 |
 |
 |
|
||
 |
|
 |
|
||
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
||
By Julie Grimstad
Are you perplexed about how to make moral medical decisions? You are not alone. The distinctions between optional medical treatment and ordinary care, between letting a person die naturally and intentionally causing a person's death have become blurred. Confusion abounds.
This confusion has been sown by "right to die" organizations determined to make euthanasia acceptable and legal. A very real war is being waged between the culture of life and the culture of death. A person's first line of defense in this culture war is a firm grasp of the moral principles that apply when making medical decisions.
Euthanasia is an act or an omission intended to cause death in order to eliminate suffering.
When making a decision to withhold or withdraw a particular form of treatment or care, ask if the intention is to hasten or cause the person's death. If so, the decision is morally unacceptable. Legally you can refuse any or all medical means, but morally you are obliged to protect and preserve your own life and may not refuse ordinary means for doing so. The words "ordinary" and "extraordinary" are not legal terms. They are used to differentiate what is morally obligatory from what is morally optional.
Ordinary medical treatment and care are routine, available, and beneficial. They are necessary to sustain life, maintain health, provide comfort, cure or improve one's condition. Ordinary means may be stopped when they cease to be effective, but never in order to hasten death.
Extraordinary medical treatment is non-obligatory. A person may refuse it because it is unduly burdensome or risky and will impose on him/her strain or suffering out of proportion with its benefits. However, when a potentially effective extraordinary treatment is available, it must always be the patient who decides whether or not to try it. If a person wants to fight for every last moment of life, that is his/her right.
When death is inevitable and imminent (expected within hours or a few days, not weeks or months) in spite of the means used, it is only necessary to provide comfort care and thus to permit a natural death. The challenge then is not how to be killed, but how to let go of life.
Euthanasia promoters assert that food and water are medical treatment, and that, because feeding tubes are artificial, they may be withheld or withdrawn. On the contrary, food and water are basic human needs and therefore basic human rights.
Feeding tubes are used for various reasons: they are simpler and less costly than spoon-feeding certain patients, they are a comfort measure, and they are necessary to sustain life when a person is unable to swallow. Yes, feeding tubes are artificial. Electricity, running water, air-conditioning, cars and telephones are also artificial. As demonstrated in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, people die without these "artificial life supports." Should we therefore take all these life-sustaining technologies away so that people who will die without them can die naturally?
When a mother is unable to breastfeed, she bottle-feeds her baby. Technically, this unnatural way of feeding a baby is "artificial life support." If a mother refuses to bottle feed her baby and says instead, "Let nature take its course," she commits murder. No one would consider her child's death to be natural.
It is essential to distinguish the circumstances under which food and fluids are withheld:
When a person's body is shutting down during the natural dying process or when a person is unable to receive food and water without harm, stopping tube-feeding or spoon-feeding is both medically and morally appropriate. In these circumstances, patients die from their disease or injury, not from dehydration.
When a person is not dying, or not dying quickly enough, food and fluids are often withheld in order to deliberately cause the person's death, because he/she is viewed as having an unacceptably low quality of life and/or as imposing burdens on others. This is simply wrong.
Death by dehydration and starvation is cruel and ugly. Nonetheless, in every state, it is now legal to take food and water away from non-dying patients in order to make them die.
"Always to care, never to kill," has been the constant motto of medical professionals throughout the ages. No law and no one can make killing patients, regardless of their medical condition, medically or morally right.
Julie Grimstad is the primary writer and editor of Euthanasia: Imposed Death. She is the executive director of Life is Worth Living, Inc., whose members are dedicated to the authentic restoration of respect for human life. Julie co-founded and served as the director of the Center for the Rights of the Terminally Ill from 1985 to 2003. A patient advocate, public speaker and writer, she is recognized for her long-standing focus on end-of-life issues. She resides in Stevens Point, WI. Julie may be contacted by email at lifeisworthliving@sbcglobal.net.
