![]() I do begrudge him and other opponents of assisted suicide their slippery, inflammatory arguments against it. I don't begrudge the Cardinal his differing view of liberty or the belief that assisted suicide cheapens regard for life. But this concept of freedom deeply offends the Church: Physician-assisted suicide "would create pressures to limit our freedom, because it could establish an expectation that certain people will be better served by being dead, a dubious premise indeed," Cardinal Sean O'Malley declares. ![]() This makes little sense if you consider few freedoms more fundamental than the freedom to end your own life on your own terms, when confronting a terminal illness and inevitable pain and suffering you'd rather avoid. If my father's doctor had been subject to a law laid down by the Catholic bishops, she might have let him suffer harder and longer, gasping for air, in his last days.Īccording to the bishops, "a society that devalues some people's lives, by hastening and facilitating their deaths, will ultimately lose respect for their other rights and freedoms." ![]() Put aside, for the moment, arguments about the right to die, and consider this: If Cardinal O'Malley's principle is the basis for secular law, if "legitimate" end-of-life care is distinguished from illegitimate "killing" on the basis of a district attorney's perception of intent, doctors risk prosecution when they administer palliative care, and patients risk gratuitous suffering. What if the only way to ease pain is to shorten life? And sometimes, palliative care involves not just "the risk of shortening life" but the knowledge that it will shorten life. I guess God knows the intent of every physician who administers pain medication to terminal patients, but law enforcement officials can't be expected to know it. According to a Church spokeswoman, "You can have whatever level of morphine you need to control the pain, even if that level of treatment hastens death." Palliative care is "legitimate," even when it risks "shortening life," Cardinal Sean O'Malley explains - so long as "the intent is not to hasten death, but only to ease the pain of a dying patient." The view of suicide as selfish, even when undertaken to avoid extreme pain and suffering, is central to the debate over it. The medical team was administering palliative care, not assisting in a suicide. ![]() Did she violate the doctrine of a church actively opposing a Death with Dignity proposal now on the ballot in Massachusetts? He received excellent, compassionate care from his nurses and from a doctor who willingly administered the morphine needed to ease his suffering - although, she advised, it would hasten his death. The findings of the study challenge the usefulness of doctors' intentions with regard to hastening the end of life as criteria for moral judgements on decisions to withhold or withdraw medical treatment.My father, a lifelong atheist, died at 91 in a Catholic hospice center. No clear association can be found between the intent to hasten the end of life and features of the treatment forgone that can be determined objectively, such as the likelihood and extent of a life-shortening effect, the immediacy of death, or the expected burden of any potential life-sustaining measure. In almost every second case, a medical decision to withhold or withdraw treatment is taken with the explicit intention of hastening the end of the patient's life. Overall, dialysis and respiration were comparatively more often forgone with the explicit intent to hasten the end of life (57% and 54%, respectively), whereas a particularly low percentage of cases with such an explicit intention was found for oncotherapy (34%). Middle-ranking countries were Italy (42%) and the Netherlands (45%). ![]() The highest numbers of cases with an underlying intention of hastening the end of life were found in Switzerland and Sweden (52% and 51%, respectively) the lowest figures came from Denmark and Belgium (36% and 38%). In the six countries studied, physicians reported they had the explicit intention of hastening the end of life in 45% of all treatments that were withheld/ withdrawn. A continuous random sample of death certificates formed the basis for contacting doctors who had attended the deceased the doctors were asked to complete, strictly anonymously, mail questionnaires on the decisions taken at the end of their patients' lives. The data presented come from EURELD, a large research project designed to investigate medical end-of-life decisions in six European countries. This study aims to provide empirical data on physicians' intentions in withholding and withdrawing treatment, and to discuss possible implications for the ethical debate. ![]()
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