Brittany Maynard has made headlines by choosing to commit suicide.
I don't think she was right to have committed suicide, but I can appreciate some mitigating factors in her life.
At the same time, she's not the bigger picture. She's just the cause célèbre du jour for euthanasia.
In fact, she became a witting pawn in the ethical debate when she cast her lot with the pro-euthanasia side. For example, see this article.
It might likewise be instructive to compare Maynard's story with the stories of other people who have been diagnosed with GBM but didn't decide to euthanize themselves. For instance, here are some GBM stories from MD Anderson in Houston, Texas (which is arguably the world's best cancer institute).
From a physician's point of view, while I empathize with their suffering, it is simply morally wrong to kill oneself deliberately, and wrong to assist someone to do so. Throw oneself on a hand grenade? The intent is to save one's comrades; one may be willing to die to do so, but that is not the primary intention. Use sufficient medication such that a suffering, terminally ill patient is out of pain, even if that means he is also unconscious, and the treatment appears to hasten death? The primary intention is to relieve suffering. Hastening death (which, BTW, is not always an outcome from sufficient palliation) is not the intention; it is a possible side effect the risk of which we may be willing to accept in order to achieve the desired therapeutic outcome. The difference is intent. There are soi-disant 'medical ethicists' who decry this outlook, claiming that what matters is outcome, not intent. They are fools. It is immediately obvious that intent matters; even our legal system recognizes that. Intent can be the difference between involuntary manslaughter and a murder charge, even if the outcome is the same.
ReplyDeleteHow to handle such things in the legal system (were we actually wise enough to insist that our legal system not legitimize 'assisted suicide') is a wisdom issue. I would probably not want to 'criminalize' the attempt on the patient's part to any great degree; I would reserve harsher sentencing for the Kervorkians among us...
Watch Obamacare cut palliative care spending and mandate suicide prescriptions - "...all they that hate me love death (Prov 8:36b)"
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