Suicide for the Terminally Ill
Re “Death Emerges as a Civil Liberty,” by Derek Humphry, Commentary, Dec. 1:
Humphry’s view that everyone has the right to suicide and the right to call in members of the medical profession as executioners is way off base. As nurses, we work hard every day to ensure physical and psychological comfort for our patients facing terminal illnesses. Adequate pain control, recognition and treatment of depression, family support services, hospice, etc. are but some of the tools we have to ensure a dignified and meaningful death for our patients. There is no dignity in being killed.
It is false to portray euthanasia as a choice between a painful death prolonged by medical technology or a quick, painless death by lethal overdose. Pain relief does not prolong death but rather enhances the quality of life at its end. Refusal of futile or burdensome medical treatment is a well-recognized and ethical right of everyone. Ethical health care professionals reject both unnecessary treatment as well as euthanasia.
Our society has long provided suicide prevention programs out of the recognition that killing oneself is a tragic mistake. We do not accept financial difficulties, failed relationships and the like as justifications for suicide. How callous and discriminatory it would be to now tell terminally ill people that we don’t really care if they kill themselves. Euthanasia is not about suicide or personal choice but rather about abandoning vulnerable people and requiring doctors and nurses to suspend the most basic principle of the healing professions: “Do no harm.”
GERMAINE WENSLEY RN, President
California Nurses for Ethical Standards
Los Angeles
* Every living thing will die! The question is when? How? Where? In many cases it is a question of mercy and love and kindness!
My father died a few months ago. We buried what was left of him . . . about 75 pounds of bone and skin. For about two years he lay in his own bed, blind, and cared for by a loving wife and a full-time care person to tend the bedsores, feed and change him much like a helpless baby.
The prostate cancer nibbled away at his body like invisible maggots until he was too weak to move. The morphine stopped the pain in his body, but this once-proud and independent spirit became twisted and tormented, for the clarity of his mind made his situation unbearable.
Twice I’ve made the choice to put my dearly loved dogs out of their misery when there was no hope for recovery. I held them close in my arms while the veterinarian administered a painless shot and they drifted off to a final rest.
How I wish my father had been given this choice--a right not to end life but to shorten the agony of the dying process. I will fight to have this most basic of freedoms for myself.
JEAN FLEMING
Studio City