Assisted suicide is metastasizing

From the Economist:

VOTERS in Massachusetts will decide next month whether a terminally ill patient with less than six months to live should be able to use a doctor’s help in committing suicide. If they assent, as the polls suggest, the state will be the third, after Oregon and Washington, to legalise assisted suicide. New Jersey introduced a bill last month to decriminalise it. The Montana Supreme Court has ruled that doctors cannot be prosecuted for prescribing lethal drugs for terminally ill patients. 

When Jack Kevorkian, an American doctor jailed after admitting helping 130 patients to die, first went on trial in 1994, assisting suicide was a crime everywhere save Switzerland. Now the trend is spreading far and wide (though not in Asia or in Muslim countries where it is still taboo). 

All this reflects a big shift towards secular thinking and individual autonomy as well as growing worries about the medicalised, miserable and costly way of death that awaits many people in rich countries. Assisted suicide typically gains overwhelming public support; legislators, pro-family lobbies, churches and doctors’ groups tend to be more squeamish. They fear that legal, easy-to-get assisted suicide will have dire social and moral effects... 

 The article claims:

Many doctors throughout Europe nevertheless continue to provide a kind of passive euthanasia for patients in their final hours or days. The “Liverpool care pathway for the dying patient”, first adopted in the north-western English city in the late 1990s, is now standard practice in most British hospitals and hospices. Under it, doctors allow the patient (or his family if he is comatose) to choose whether to prolong life artificially or to remove the life-support system and let the patient die—often with the aid of an extra-strong dose of (life-shortening) painkillers. In America, beset by worries about lawsuits, such an approach is rare and risky.

That's a lie. The removal of extraordinary care (ventilators, medications to support blood pressure. etc) is very common in the U.S. It's called "comfort care", and it's done routinely, in every hospital, all the time. It means that we cease doing heroic things to save life when it only means more suffering, and we focus care on the patient's comfort. We use analgesics, etc. in doses that are necessary to relieve suffering. We do not kill patients. We do relieve their pain and suffering, and there is no problem with withdrawing heroic medical care when it is futile. There is no issue of lawsuits.

Why would the author of this article lie so blatantly? It is a lie, because comfort care is so ubiquitous that to deny it in an article providing so much other detail means that the author intentionally misrepresented it.

The reason that the author lied in this article is that he intended to frighten readers into supporting assisted suicide, as they would believe that without it they were consigned to a medical nightmare of pointless treatment. But that does not happen.

Assisted suicide is an issue on the front lines of the war between those who respect human life and dignity and those who believe that killing human beings is a form of medical treatment. Assisted suicide  is utterly evil. It will corrupt the medical profession in a way that the Nazis and the eugenicists began, and it is a betrayal of suffering helpless people who need compassion and relief of pain and fear, not medically sanctioned (self) execution.

Killing is never medical care, and it is not the answer to suffering.