You Have No Right To Die
Think your body is your own, to do with as you please? Think again. If you're terribly sick and want to kill yourself, you're in big trouble, thanks to the god squadders. Crispin Sartwell writes in the LA Times:
My wife assisted in the suicide of her first husband, who was in the last stages of AIDS. By writing about the experience, she found herself an emblem and a public advocate of the right to die and assisted suicide. Though she thought it possible that her confession would lead to prosecution, she was never contacted by law enforcement.In the clear cases, it's an extremely direct issue of who owns your body: you or the Department of Justice. Indeed, no freedom is more fundamental or profound. Any principle that justifies government control of your death would justify the government enslaving you or executing you arbitrarily.
As medical technology advances, most deaths in the developed world become at some point a matter of decision for families and doctors. That is why the issue becomes more pressing every year.
...There are two strands of conservative politics warring here. There is the evangelical Christian side that wants to impose its will to keep you alive at all costs, and then there's the side that wants to make every policy decision based on the concept of freedom. The first wants to tell you whom you can marry, what you can watch on television, what you can put in your pipe. The latter wants to free the whole world from tyranny, of which government control over the bodies and medical choices of its citizens is one example.
If the right to die is consistently denied, if doctors feel they cannot help patients and their families make this decision, if spouses and children feel that they will face publicity and perhaps even prosecution, then our hospitals will fill with people hanging on to the merest semblance of life, people who, if they could, would beg for release.
While, obviously, a question of humanity, it's also, quite frankly, a question of money. Would our health care costs be so outrageous if we weren't prolonging the lives of people who are little more than 90-year-old vegetables? If you, as a younger person, are vegetable-ized in a serious accident, and you don't have a living will, and you end up living, there's a good chance you'll spend years -- or decades -- as a prisoner of your own body in a nursing home (as a friend of mine most tragically was after a terrible accident that left her brain without oxygen for nearly 15 minutes).
A doctor friend of mine warned me to warn her family to put a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) on her while she was in the hospital, because, he said, "nursing homes are for prolonging life -- that's how they make their money, and they will not stop her suffering." Unfortunately, the family didn't really get the seriousness of this (despite my warnings), and put a DNR on her too late, and she was brain stem activity only kept alive in a shriveled, twisted body in a bed for more than a year. (Some doctors projected that she would be kept alive like that for decades.) She never, never would have wanted to live that way -- but even if she had left an advanced directive...could we have legally pulled the plug?
My friend, who is a nurse on a chronic ward, says there are people there for years, literally with their spinal columns exposed because so much of them has worn away, and yet the doctors keep slicing and sticking pieces over the exposed parts. These people are in comas, cannot eat or often breathe on their own. Sometimes, he says, it's the family's fault; they cannot let the person go. Other times, it's the overambition of the doctors. He deals with it by quietly letting people go rather then calling a Code Red.
Then there's Oregon's death with dignity law, and the guy that last month woke up 63 hours after ingesting a lethal dose. He told his wife he'd seen god, and god asked, "Do you want to go to heaven?" The man told god yes, and that god said, what he was doing was not the way to go about it, and that he needed to go back. He did, and died two weeks later. His wife, who'd supported him all along, still says she's pro-death with dignity, and is enraged that Bush is trying to get this law turned over and persecute doctors who prescribe the drugs. The man's brother, however, now feels her has the religious proof he needs to deny others the option his brother initially took.
nancy at March 9, 2005 9:21 AM
Points of clarification, Nancy: "Code red" is a fire, "code blue" is when someone stops breathing (and codes brown and yellow are gross).
Lena, nitpicker extraordinaire at March 9, 2005 10:18 AM
I *still* have not done a living will, and I need to. I have made it clear to my best friend that they are to put a DNR on me, but right now he doesn't have that power of attorney. This makes me really want to get my affairs in order. I would *never* want to be kept alive under those circumstances. Geez. Let me go if it gets to that point.
Goddyss at March 9, 2005 11:17 AM
> ...if she had left an advanced directive...could we have legally pulled the plug?
I don't think so, not without the co-operation of the hospital. Hospitals like to be involved in these delicate matters (after all you're pulling the plug on a source of INCOME from their perspective).
I had a spell in a teaching hospital recently, and the conversation went as follows (not verbatim):
Them: Please complete and sign this form assigning power of attorney to somebody in the event we make you into a veggie.
Me: No thanks, I have my own living will on file.
Them: Ooooo, good. May we have a copy of that document?
Me: Certainly, if I can have a copy of the written instructions you give to nursing staff on dealing with issues such as withdrawing life support.
Them: Those instructions are confidential.
Me: Well, so is my living will.
Them: How can we be expected to fulfill your wishes if you don't tell us what they are?
Me: Don't worry, if the situation arises you'll see that document so fast it'll red-shift. Run along now.
Stu "El Inglés" Harris at March 9, 2005 4:35 PM
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