Posted on 11/04/2007 11:22:36 AM PST by wagglebee
The day will come. It may be 50 years from today or it could be next month but the day will arrive when you are sitting in a doctor’s office or lying in a hospital bed, when you’ll hear the words, “There’s little we can do for you. We will try to control your pain as much as possible.
“You are dying.”
You may already be picturing your last days and hours — at home, in your own bed, surrounded by your loved ones, free of pain, ready to go. But that vision is wishful thinking. Most of us will draw our last breath in a hospital bed. Some of us will die alone, while many will be lost in a medicated fog.
Genetic counselling and in vitro fertilization has revolutionized how life begins. Now many think Canada is overdue for an honest public debate about how life ends.
Today, assisted suicide and euthanasia barely registers on the political radar screen. Like abortion, same-sex marriage and other hot-button social issues, lawmakers are loathe to venture into the ethical minefield. Across the country, Canadians are running for the cure, not marching in the streets for the right to die.
But with baby boomers shifting into their senior years, some believe the fight for what some call “the last right” will heat up as a generation raised on freedoms and liberties grow old, sick and helpless.
During the past decade, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland have legalized euthanasia or doctor-assisted suicide. For the last nine years in Oregon, a competent person with a prognosis of less than six months to live can obtain a prescription from a doctor for a lethal dose of barbituates. Today in Canada, a person who carries out euthanasia faces a first-degree murder charge, with a mandatory minimum life sentence and 25-year prison term. Anyone who helps a person commit suicide could face up to 14 years in jail.
Could assisted suicide become law in Canada? A decade ago, few would have predicted same-sex marriage would be as Canadian as Mounties and maple syrup.
There are a growing number of people who believe we have the right to make that decision — to end our own lives with the help of a doctor.
In 1994, a doctor helped Sue Rodriguez end her life, a few months after the Supreme Court of Canada rejected the B.C. woman’s Charter challenge. Elizabeth MacDonald didn’t wait for Canadian lawmakers. Earlier this year, the 38-year-old Nova Scotia woman with advanced-stage multiple sclerosis travelled to Switzerland to have an assisted suicide.
In 2005, Marcel Tremblay, a 78-year-old Ottawa man with a chronic lung condition, publicized his planned suicide by helium gas to help the right-to-die cause.
A 2002 Gallup poll showed support for euthanasia has risen steadily over the past 30 years, with a majority of Canadians now favouring it for people with terminal illness who are in pain.
One ethicist says most Canadians tolerate the idea of assisted suicide without necessarily supporting it.
“I think the middle ground of tolerating without approving is expanding,” says Bernard Dickens, professor emeritus of health law and policy at the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics.
Dickens calls it a replay of the abortion debate in the 1980s — two entrenched, committed camps at opposite ends of the issue. Supporters of the right-to-die movement are “independent, strong-willed people” — determined to choose how they will die, says Ruth von Fuchs, president of the Right to Die Society of Canada.
In Canada, the movement fits into two camps, with the 300-member Dying With Dignity Canada doing low-key lobbying on the assisted-dying issue.
Its more radical cousin, the Right to Die Society of Canada, counts only a few dozen members and offers legal advice and self-help assistance, including a mail-order guide on “a humane self-chosen death.” But both organizations see assisted suicide as a human rights issue.
Depicting assisted suicide as an issue of personal choice and dignity makes the cause more agreeable, says a historian of the euthanasia movement. “If the issue is framed as an issue purely in terms of personal autonomy, of choice and human rights, the vast majority of baby boomers are going to be sympathetic to the legalization of assisted suicide,” says Ian Dowbiggin, professor of history at the University of Prince Edward Island and the author of A Concise History of Euthanasia.
But one physician says assisted-suicide supporters have “perverted” the notion of dignity.
“The moment the right-to-die movement sees discomfort, disability or social embarassment — like having to have someone wipe your bottom for you — they immediately declare a loss of dignity, as if dignity was no more than social status or personal ability,” says Dr. Will Johnston, chair of Canadian Physicians for Life.
“There must be big problem with the reality when the image has to be so carefully manipulated to make it palatable to the public,” says Johnston of the shift among right-to-die groups to use “aid-in-dying” instead of the assisted-suicide term.
But Donald Babey, executive director of Dying with Dignity Canada, sees the assisted-dying cause as a grassroots movement standing up to “power structures” like mainline churches which “grasp at straws to legitimize its existence.”
“I’m convinced they’ve taken a manipulative and emotional approach and not a logical one,” says Babey of the argument that likens assisted suicide to “some kind of social cleansing.”
One of Canada’s top biomedical ethicists calls assisted suicide “a pretty straightforward issue.”
“The issue is how we die and whether there is something wrong with actively killing people,” says Margaret Somerville, the founding director of McGill’s Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law.
Support for euthanasia reflects a shift in societal values that looks at death as “sanitized, medicalized and intensely individualized,” says Somerville, the author of Death Talk: The Case Against Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide.
Sanctioning assisted suicide would have a “huge symbolic effect” on how society treats its most vulnerable, says one religious leader.
“The response that should be given is one of care and compassion and support to those people at this point in their lives, not to kill them,” says Bishop Ronald Fabbro, a board member of the Catholic Organization for Life and Family.
When a seriously ill person becomes depressed and dependent on others, their death wish is really a “cry for help,” says Fabbro.
“You’re talking about people at their most vulnerable time. People often need to be protected at that time from others and ... even from themselves,” says Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.
Supporters and opponents of assisted suicide use the experiences of the Netherlands and the state of Oregon to make their case.
After existing underground in Dutch hospitals for decades, euthanasia was legalized in 2002. In the Netherlands, a person can request an assisted suicide if their suffering is “unbearable with no prospect of improvement.” The request must be voluntary and the death by lethal injection must be performed by a physician.
Dowbiggin believes the Dutch experience offers a “cautionary lesson” for Canada, showing that countries that begin to take a permissive attitude to assisted suicide keep pushing the boundaries.
But others say the Dutch law brings the practice out in the open. “The dangers of abuse and exploitation and mistakes in Holland are significantly less than they are in Canada,” says Dr. Arthur Schafer, director of the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics.
“We know it happens in Canada but it happens in the dark,” he adds. In Oregon, aid-in-dying has been legal since 1997. Defenders of the Oregon law say the statistics have proved its critics wrong, showing the law’s safeguards both protects against abuses and respects the wishes of competent individuals.
“You have evidence and data about why people are seeking it, who’s seeking it and the fact that it’s not the vulnerable who are accessing assisted suicide in Oregon but it’s the privileged,” says Jocelyn Downie, professor of law and medicine at Dalhousie University and the author of Dying Justice: A Case for Decriminalizing Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide in Canada. The overwhelming majority of the 292 people who died using the law were white, college-educated, middle-class seniors.
Any change in Canada’s laws won’t likely be coming from Parliament. The best odds for a change in law would come from the courts. Any legal challenge would need to wind its way through several lower courts before getting before the Supreme Court of Canada.
“The moment the right-to-die movement sees discomfort, disability or social embarassment — like having to have someone wipe your bottom for you — they immediately declare a loss of dignity, as if dignity was no more than social status or personal ability,” says Dr. Will Johnston, chair of Canadian Physicians for Life.
“There must be big problem with the reality when the image has to be so carefully manipulated to make it palatable to the public,” says Johnston of the shift among right-to-die groups to use “aid-in-dying” instead of the assisted-suicide term.
Precisely! The culture of death is trying to change the language to mask their agenda; they don't care about the infirmed at all, they just want to kill them.
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If you need assistance to kill yourself, it’s not really suicide. If an individual makes the decision that their last act before they meet their Maker will be to take their own life, that’s their call. But this is heading down the road where some family member (or worse, a government bureaucrat) gets to make that decision. Not good.
Soylent Green Comeing soon to a culture near you, and I aon’t talking about the movie but reality.
The karma of suicide is extremely negative.
The first thing I would do is stay away from hospices, although there are pro-life hospices, if you can find one.
Hopefully, he'll never get the chance to say it again. What a doofus remark.
Why doesn't anybody ever talk about protecting the disabled and the seniors? It's about machines and tubes.
Living has been completely dehumanized so that dying seems like a piece of cake. Well, it's God's call, not death merchants or doofuses pandering to them.
Lotsa helpful information.
The first problem is the false idea that such decisions belong in the hands of the croakers in the first place. Doctors are just hired help and should keep their mouths shut about moral issues. A doctor’s opinion about whether someone should be murdered should carry no more weight than an auto mechanic’s.
However the dwindling nature of socialized medicine and the inevitable shortages that will occur because of bureaucratic incompetence (a redundant term) ensures that the govt will eventually do what it must to find excuses to deny medical treatment to people considered unimportant. Murdering patients is inevitable. They already do this quietly by denying dialysis to the elderly in places where the govt is to corrupt to spend the money on machines rather than on pay raises and bonuses for themselves.
Naturally politicians, bureaucrats and their families will be exempt... even though they are the least valuable people in any society.
Hospices are generally wonderful places, that assist both families and patients in the months preceeding death. All people in hospice are dying. It is a requirement to go there. Why do you say to stay away?
Socialists who kill unborn children and those who are ill......yet they fight to stop the death penalty against cold blooded killers ?
Well there ya go then.......they can’t hide their cow crap agendas with stink like that around .
Voting for a Clintonista is like chickens voting for Col Sanders !
The decision on whether or not to kill someone either before they’re born or before they’re about to die is NOT a debatable topic. It’s evil, plain and simple, we need not go further. Let life begin and end naturally, and stop these useless debates sponsored by the culture of death in the hope of trying to advance their agenda. They make it sound like it’s a complicated issue. It’s NOT! Murder of the innocent is morally wrong. I thought we all knew that.
I think that many individual Hospice volunteers are wonderful.
However, on the whole, I would not trust a hospice, the most famous case, looking at what they did to Terri Schiavo.
Here are a few other examples:
“Ron Panzer, President of the pro-life Hospice Patients Alliance (HPA), contends that hospice workers all over the country are routinely killing patients.
“Those who report to HPA tell us they’ve overheard nurses saying things like, `I’m just like Jack Kevorkian, only I do it with morphine.’ And they get away with it week by week because it’s hospice.” (LifeNews.com).”
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2005/cover032905.htm
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I talked with a woman who volunteered at a hospice, and the woman told me that she questioned why a patient was taking so mand drugs, and she was told that it really didn’t matter because the person was dying anyway.
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A friend told me about a friend of hers who was dying of cancer, so my friend and some other folks, and a priest got together and prayed for this woman. After the prayer get together, the woman felt better, her spirits were raised, her appetite returned, and she asked her mom to make her a sandwich.
Later a woman from hospice came, and told the woman’s mom to leave them alone. When the mother came back into the room, her daughter was depressed again, and soon after died. The hospice woman took away all hope, and I don’t understand what’s wrong with a little hope to get you through something. And sometimes miracles do happen.
And if we had let nature take its course in so very many ways, most of us wouldn't survive until forty. Many of us wouldn't have survived birth or the first year of life.
Be serious. Hospice didn’t kill Terri Schiavo, her husband did. The hospice in that case had no choice but to follow the instructions they received.
Your comments about hospice frustrate me. Hospice is dedicated to allowing patients to die as comfortably as possible. Medication, including high doses of morphine, is sometimes necessary to do that. The goal is to keep the patient comfortable, not to kill them.
People fear dying a long painful death. This is why the euthanasia crowd is successful. Hospice is a way to avoid euthanasia, while keeping the patient from suffering. It is very important to have hospice or we will have wide-spread euthanasia.
I have also heard nurses say things about giving so much morphine they feel like Kevorkian. There is a point were potentially fatal doses are required to keep the pain at bay. Making a semi-joke is a way for the nurses to alleviate stress that comes with their job. They follow orders from a doctor and do not decide themselves how much medicine they give the patient.
I work with many hospice centers. They are wonderful people with a difficult and stressful job. It isn’t easy to work with the dying, those in pain, and families who are facing the loss of a loved one. Their patients all die, which isn’t very rewarding either. They do it with grace and competence, and should be commended.
I meant that you must be dying to go to hospice. Not that you are required to go when you are dying. Thank you for your thoughtful post. I agree completely.
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