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Do I have to have a living will? Last year, I had an experience that gave me the distinct impression that if I didn't have one, my life was hardly worth, well, living.
A routine mammogram had revealed that I had early-stage breast cancer. This kind of cancer is noninvasive and thus not particularly life-threatening if promptly attended to, and the required outpatient surgery isn't especially risky. Nonetheless, one of the shoals I had to maneuver through at the hospital (which otherwise afforded me excellent care) was a series of efforts to persuade me to sign on to the currently fashionable notion of a "good death."
Those efforts came in the form of a living will, one of those advance directives on end-of-life care that are currently urged upon us all by such high-minded organizations as the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, state laws and an array of policymakers, bioethicists and advice columnists. Even this newspaper ran a long article in its business section this year advancing the notion that you haven't got your life in order without a living will. Whether to have a living will is presumably up to the patient. But I've developed a sneaking suspicion that someone else may be hoping to call the shots. After three attempts to induce me either to sign up or to state my refusal to do so in writing, I had to wonder how voluntary a living will really is in many cases. In my case, I started to feel ever-so-slightly harassed.
~Snip~
Furthermore, I found something weasely in the way all those options were presented, as though my only real choice were between being dispatched into the hereafter at the first sign of loss of consciousness or being stuck with as many tubes as needles in a voodoo doll and imprisoned inside a ventilator until global warming melts the ice caps and the hospital washes out to sea. I found the box on the form that said "I decline a living will" and checked it. Right now, my husband is my living will, and after we spent 13 days observing Terri Schiavo exercise her "right to die" by being slowly dehydrated to death after her feeding tube was removed in 2005, he knows exactly how I feel about such matters.
~Snip~
As far as I can tell, bioethicists exist for the most part to do some moral chin-pulling before giving the green light to whatever consensus the rest of the elite have reached. If you believe, as the Dutch do, that it's fine for a children's hospital to euthanize severely disabled infants, you can always find a bioethicist to give you a stamp of approval. If you want to harvest the organs of dying people without waiting for brain death to occur, you can probably find a bioethicist to sign on to that, too. Myself, I'm with Slate blogger Mickey Kaus. In 2003, as the Schiavo controversy was raging and Yale surgeon Sherwin Nuland, author of "How We Die" and an advocate of limited assisted suicide, was pontificating on National Public Radio about her low quality of life, Kaus wrote: "If I'm ever in Terri Schiavo's situation, and not in any pain, please follow these simple steps: Keep the feeding tube in, and keep Dr. Nuland out."
A good death? I'll take a pass
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Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- The nation's Catholic bishops on Wednesday overwhelmingly voted for a new document saying that the abortion issue should guide the voting decisions Catholics make. While the Catholic Church recognizes that a variety of political issues are important, the bishops said pro-life issues take precedence.
"The direct and intentional destruction of innocent human life is always wrong and is not just one issue among many," the bishops said in the new document.
Catholic Bishops Vote for Document Saying Abortion Should Guide Voting
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