Posted on 04/14/2011 12:45:28 PM PDT by wagglebee
Simon Fitzmaurice with his wife and children
DUBLIN, April 12, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a powerful op-ed in today’s Irish Times, an Irish man with degenerative motor neurone disease (MND) has revealed how he was heavily pressured by the medical community to refuse the ventilator that is keeping him alive.
After having been admitted to intensive care for pneumonia, a common complication for paralyzed patients, Simon Fitzmaurice began receiving assisted breathing and a feeding tube. Shortly after being admitted, Fitzmaurice said, a doctor came in and told him it was rare and expensive for patients to have a ventilator at home.
According to Fitzmaurice the doctor told him, with his wife and mother present, “That it is time for me to make the hard choice. He tells me that there have only been two cases of invasive home ventilation, but in both cases the people were extremely wealthy.”
“He looks at me. ‘This is it now for you. It is time for you to make the hard choice, Simon.’ My mother and my wife are now holding each other, sobbing.”
But Fitzmaurice’s instinctive reaction was for life: “While he is looking at me, my life force, my soul, the part of me that feels like every part, is unequivocal. I want to live. It infuses my whole body to such an extent that I feel no fear in the face of this man.”
Two days after this encounter, he wrote, he and his family were informed that the home ventilator he needed was covered by Ireland’s national health insurer, the Health Services Executive (HSE), and that the home care package needed to run the machine could be covered by the HSE and his family.
Fitzmaurice recounts that was later asked by a neurologist why he wanted to live, even though he had a degenerative disease that would eventually kill him. His answer: “Love for my wife. Love for my children. My friends, my family. Love for life in general. My love is undimmed, unbowed, unbroken. I want to live. Is that wrong?”
“Motor neurone disease is a killer. But so is life,” continued Fitzmaurice. “Everybody dies. But just because you die, just because you will die at some point in the future, does that mean you should kill yourself now? For me, they were asking me to take my own life. Or to endorse euthanasia. I refused.”
Experts say that Fitzmaurice’s experience is not uncommon and that incidents like these are becoming a trend in medical practice – a trend that has become nearly universal in developed countries, especially those with nationalized, government funded health care.
“Sadly, his story is all too common,” said Alex Schadenberg, head of Canada’s Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.
Schadenberg said that philosophical trends away from traditional medical ethics, combined with massive tax-funded health care systems, have given rise to a new utilitarian-based ethical paradigm in treatment decision making.
Under this paradigm, called bioethics, Schadenberg said, “value judgments and negative attitudes toward people with degenerative conditions have led to imposing death on people who are vulnerable.”
Hospital bioethics committees now routinely decide to withdraw treatment that could save lives, based on the principle of “patient autonomy” that holds it is in the patient’s “best interests” to be “allowed to die,” often by the withholding of food and water.
These decisions are increasingly being taken without the consent, and sometimes actively against the will, of the patient and his family. In some countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands, the new ethical system has led to legalized euthanasia and widespread abuse of the legal “safeguards” surrounding it.
Recent studies out of Belgium have shown that 32 percent of all legal euthanasia deaths are committed without request or consent by patients or families and only 47.2 percent of all euthanasia deaths are reported. In the Netherlands, the number is 550 deaths without request or consent each year and at least 20 per cent of all euthanasia deaths unreported.
Schadenberg said, “Everyone needs to be aware, society is already imposing death on vulnerable people and if euthanasia or assisted suicide becomes legal then it will simply be done in a quicker and quiet manner.”
As for Fitzmaurice, he writes: “I do not speak for all people with motor neurone disease. I only speak for myself. Perhaps others would question whether or not to ventilate. But I believe in being given the choice, not encouraged to follow the status quo.”
“I am not a tragedy,” he said. “I neither want nor need pity. I am full of hope. The word hope and MND do not go together in this country. Hope is not about looking for a cure to a disease. Hope is a way of living. We often think we are entitled to a long and fruitful Coca-Cola life. But life is a privilege, not a right. I feel privileged to be alive. That’s hope.”
Well said, wagglebee.
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Excellent point.
Thanks for that news. Wonderful news.
The tests are not infallible.
I can also see these eugenecists having a 'clerical error' and killing off healthy kids as well, perhaps even to meet a quota. I would not want to extrapolate the evil opportunities which would spring from such.
I can't argue that government should be removed as much as possible from the equation, but at the same time there is that treacly situation where a lot of people have paid for something, and should get what they paid for. We have a similar problem with Social Security.
Neither system should have existed; the challenge is finding an equitable way to quit.
In the meantime, either could be treated as a way for our society to provide for those who suffer catastrophic problems, while the rest of us count our blessings. The less Government in the middle of it all, the more efficient (cost wise) the safety net will be. There are countless other places a dollar could be saved without resorting to murder.
I still live in a place where there are jars on the counters at the convenience stores where people can donate to help a family with sudden medical problems and no/not enough insurance, where benefit auctions are held to help out those who truly are in need.
That sense of community has not been wrested from us yet, nor can it be abused in a town where most know each other.
However, it appears that in many places, the 'government will take care of them' attitude has replaced the 'we look out for our own' attitude communities used to have most everywhere.
When a society loses the sense that we have some moral responsibility for each other, not through the threat of legal intervention, but out of basic kindness, we have lost that sense of community which makes any society cohesive and we have lost our sense of responsibility to our society as well. It is the threshhold of decay, the top of the slippery slope into the pit of barbarism, no matter how technologically refined.
How far we have come from "Ask not what your Country can do for you, but what you can do for your Country." in just a few decades.
To hear them tell it they are. They hounded this couple to abort.
Austin came in at 8 lbs 3 ozs. Mom are Dad are stunned that he hasn’t all the health issues that doctors swore he would. And glad that they trusted God for a healthy baby.
Such wonderful news. I bet Mom and Dad learned some lessons, too, about trusting docs and so on. I can only imagine how thankful they are!
I think I’ve mentioned that when I was preg with child #2, and had been abandoned by so-called husband, my mother came to visit me and pressured me so heavily to get an abortion I had to push her out of my door and slam it shut.
When I was 34 and having my daughter, the doctor told me that I was "at risk" (my age) for the baby to have problems. They wanted to run all kinds of tests. I told him to take a flying leap. In 1985 that kind of thinking wasn't prevalent and I was furious!
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