Euthanasia

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In a case when someone is comatose, and can't express their wishes, then a living will should prevail. Failing that, a combination of law and a physicians’ consensus prognosis should decide when to pull the plug. If you force someone to stay alive against their will, that is torture, a crime I consider more serious than murder. If there are any capital offenses, torture should be on that list.

Nobody wants anyone killed against their wishes. I am furious with meddling religious fruitcakes accusing people like me of wanting to kill people who don’t want to die, especially the disabled or mentally retarded. I am in favour of freedom. I don’t approve of coersion in these matters either to force people to die or to stay alive.

Definitions

euthanasia

Euthanasia has several meanings:

1. Literally "good death", any peaceful death.
2. Using an injection of seconal to kill a pet when it becomes homeless, old, sick or feeble.
3. Hitler decided to remove certain groups from the gene pool by killing homosexuals, Jews, gypsies and mentally retarded people. Euthanasia was the Nazi euphemism.
4. Killing a patient at the request of the family. The patient is brain dead, comatose or otherwise incapable of letting it be known if he or she would prefer to live or die.
5. Mercy killing.
6. Physician-assisted suicide, phaspacts.
7. Killing a terminally ill person at their request, phactpared.

I use the term euthanasia only in senses (6) and (7) in this essay. When other people debate about euthanasia they could well be using it in senses (1) through (5), or with some other definition. Unfortunately, in English, we use the same word for seven different things. I have coined the terms phaspacts and phactpared to be unambiguous.

mercy killing

Killing someone to put them out of their suffering. The killer may or may not have the informed consent of the person killed. I, personally, use the term mercy killing only when there is no consent. Legally, mercy killing is usually treated as murder.

murder

Intentionally killing someone in an unlawful way. There are two kinds of murder.

1. The murderer has the informed consent of the person killed.
2. The murderer does not have the informed consent of the person killed.

In most parts of the world, types (1) and (2) murder are treated identically. In other parts, type (1) murder is excusable under certain special circumstances, in which case it ceases to be considered murder. Murder is by definition unlawful. It is a legal term not a moral one. Whether euthanasia is murder or not is a simple question for lawyers — "Will you go to jail for doing it or won’t you?" Whether euthanasia should be considered murder or not is a matter for legislators. Whether euthansia is good or bad is a deep question for the individual citizen. A right to die and a pro life proponent could both agree "euthanasia is murder", meaning you will go to jail if you are caught doing it, but the right to die person would add, "but under certain circumstances, it should not be, just as it is not considered murder now in the Netherlands.".

palliative care

The active relief of suffering in a terminally-ill individual and although there are occasions when treatment may shorten life, this is not the intended or anticipated result. It is simply a side effect or complication of therapy.

phactpared

Physician-Activated Patient-Requested Death. This is just like physician-assisted suicide, however, on a signal from the patient, the physician "turns on the gas", thus actively killing the patient. The law usually treats this as murder. People do not necessarily match on whether they approve of phactpared and physician-assisted suicide. For example, my mother, for religious reasons, believed that it was morally acceptable for her to request phactpared, but not physician-assisted suicide. To her, suicide was a sin, but requesting someone else to kill you was not. Her logic escapes me. Some terminally ill people feel they could not deal with the terrible moment of a physician-assisted suicide, but feel they could possibly confront that same moment in a physician-activated one. That is why some people include phactpared as part of the "right to die". I have coined this odd term because the term euthanasia has too many meanings, which leads to confusing debate.

phaspacts

Physician-Assisted Patient-Activated Suicide. See physician-assisted suicide.

physician-assisted suicide

The physician provides materials useful in suicide to a patient who requests them. The physician might for example drag in a cylinder of gas, hook up the mask, but the patient would have to turn on the gas himself. It also counts as assisted suicide if patient uses a computer supplied by a physician to turn on the gas, using whatever remaining abilities he has to communicate with the computer. The right to a physician-assisted suicide is the most debated "right to die". see phaspacts.

pro life

The view that it is never justified to take one’s own or anyone else’s life under any circumstances. It refers to the religious, moral and legal stance.

right to die

The right to refuse medical treatment, even if that refusal would result in death. This right is less controversial. Also the right to assistance from a physician for the terminally ill in committing a pain-free suicide, i.e. physician-assisted suicide, or phaspacts. Some people also include the right for the terminally ill to have a doctor "turn on the gas" for the patient, to actually kill the patient, not just set up for a suicide. I personally don’t include phactpared when I use the term "right to die".

right to life

You might think this refers to the right of someone so severely disabled or so ill or so destitute that they cannot contribute in any way to society to receive the necessary care to keep him alive. But it does not. It refers to the right of people other than a terminally ill patient to keep him alive against his wishes. It means denying his right to die. It is a deliberately deceptive and dishonest term to trick people who support a true right to life into signing on for denying people’s right to die.

suicide

When a person kills himself without help. If a patient dies of a drug overdose, that would count as physician-assisted suicide only if the physician gave the drug with the intention it be used for suicide.

What Are The Terminally Ill Asking For?

We ask for the right to assistance to die when life becomes unbearable. We ask for the right to determine for ourselves what unbearable means. Since suffering is subjective, how can any one but the patient decide just how much suffering is too much? It is the arrogant to think you can make that decision for someone else. It is heartless to think you can make up a rule that says no amount of suffering is too much. If you are not the one doing the suffering, you have no right to enforce such a rule. If you want to enforce merciless penance on yourself, you are welcome.

We ask that doctors or others who help us be free from prosecution. Such assistance is sporadically prosecuted now in Canada.

We ask that there be a formal legal procedure to request assistance in suicide. The intent is to allow a cooling off period, to bring in counsellors, to alert the family, to summon treatment for depression, and when the suffering cannot be sufficiently alleviated, a quiet and dignified death, surrounded by family and friends.

We demand phaspacts, and request phactpared.

At the bare minimum, we ask that family and friends who come to be with us at that very difficult and frightening time when we elect to die at our own hand, will not be prosecuted for murder or assisting a suicide.

What Aren’t The Terminally Ill Asking For?

• That doctors who are opposed to euthanasia be forced to help patients die.
• That people have the right to suicide on demand, without delay.
• That anyone have the power to request that somebody else’s life be terminated. Euthanasia is purely something your request for yourself.

Arguments Against Euthanasia Rights

The Oregon Experience

The Advantage to Pro-Lifers

By requiring a formal procedure to request euthanasia, it would be much harder to slip euthanasia by with a nudge nudge, wink wink the way it happens now.

Why Do I Care?

I get extremely angry at busy-body Catholics poking their nose into what I consider a most personal of issues. They have some very warped ideas about what the creator expects of us, and like medieval torturers are willing to put people through extreme pain to save their souls. As I said on the CBC, "It is none of their damn business!"

I think it should be my decision when suffering is too much. To retain that control I will be forced to kill myself early, while I still have enough strength to handle the suicide totally unaided. I have been quite sick of late, and I have been making preparations. This is ironic. Meddling Christians are pushing me into premature suicide. If they would simply mind their own bloody business, I could in all probability safely postpone that suicide indefinitely and enjoy a natural death.

The conviction of Dr. Kevorkian for murder shows the public are bloody fools, and can’t tell the difference between an axe murder and mercy. The sanctimonious A&E biography of Dr. Kevorkian reiterates that blindness. Nobody cares a fig about the person begging to die. The "victim" of euthanasia is the only seriously interested party, and he is the only party given no say in the debate. He is presumed incompetent simply because he can no longer stand the suffering. The selfishness of the meddling Christians and their superstitious arguments makes me nauseous. Christians pretend the suffering does not exist because it conflicts with their superstitious beliefs.

The judge who sentenced Kevorkian chastised him as if he were an serial axe murderer. She refused to see the difference.

I get furious at Christians forcing their crazy superstitions about death down the throats of those who want no part of them. Why should a man with ALS and a month to live have to put up with the final hours of slowly suffocating to death? Someone who helps is merciful. Someone who turns away is a NAZI.

Consider also those who are not terminally ill, but who have had some dreadful accident, such as burns to 90% of the body or a broken spinal chord so they are paralysed from the neck down. No matter how much they might scream "I want to die. Please somebody kill me!" they are trapped with no means of escape no matter how utterly intolerable their existence is. This is Christian mercy solidified into law.

Imagine the outcry if some religious group were able to push through legislation to also outlaw euthanasia for animals. No matter how horribly injured your pet were, you had no option but to sit by and watch him suffer and slowly die. We would consider it sadistic. Why do we have more compassion for our pets than our loved ones?

Mind You Own Business!

Pro choice means just that, that you want the option to die left open for you and others. You don’t want to close off all possibility of early death no matter how intolerable life becomes. The non-terminally ill have this right naturally, and just like most terminally ill people, elect to keep on living. It is unfair to take this right away from the terminally ill, at the very time it is most reassuring that there exists an escape should life get too terrible.

Mr. Novakowski has been pontificating on the Robert Latimer case. He has a daughter disabled with cerebral palsy, which he considers makes his situation identical with that Latimer found himself in. The situations are completely different. Novakowski’s daughter is healthy and happy. There is utterly no reason to help her die. Latimer’s daughter was screaming in pain. Novakowski says euthanasia is not the answer in his case. Of course! Nobody said it was! The right to die is about letting people choose to escape suffering, not bumping them off because caretakers are fed up with caring for them. When Novakowski talks of the slippery slope he is projecting his own desires on the pro-euthanasia camp. He is the only one who feels tempted to bump off his daughter. Nobody in the pro-euthanasia camp is willing to let him get away with that. Novakowski imagines taking away the right to die somehow increases respect for the individual. It is the very opposite. He wants the government to meddle and bully where it has no business.

Christian Compassion

Active vs Passive Euthanasia

I say this is bloody nonsense. What counts is your intent and the result. If your intent is to kill and the result is death, it does not matter what your means it, it is still killing.

Consider that if you kill an infant by neglect or a beating, it is still murder. If a kidnapper kills his victim by starvation or a gun, it is still murder. Why should killing a patient actively or passively be any different?

If you are going to euthanise someone, be at least as kind as you would to a beloved pet dog when you put it down. Use a method that is painless and quick such as a shot of seconal.

It is monstrous to hold out only the torture of passive euthanasia to someone terminally ill in such pain they cannot bear any more. It is downright sadistic. It is similarly monstrous to euthanise someone that way who is not able to protest. If there is a hell, I hope all Christians who try to fob passive euthanasia by dehydration off on others spend eternity there, suffering exactly as they made others suffer.

Mark Pickup

Pickup also argues that the terminally ill person has no right to choose when to die. He should stay alive to please those around him no matter how intense the pain. This is insane, considering postponing grief of more importance than avoiding torture. Pickup imagines modern medicine can always manage pain. I have only once been near death, but I have been seriously ill many times in which modern medicine could in no way begin to manage the pain. Try a passing a kidney or gallstone, or being so nauseous you threw up continuously for 30 minutes. Then imagine that level of pain bedevilling you for the rest of your days without letup.

What gives people like Mr. Pickup who have never felt serious pain, the right to tell others who have, how much pain is unbearable? How much pain is too much is a highly subjective thing, and it is not something you can decide for someone else. Just because I can bear a particular pain does not mean someone else is equally insensitive to it. My sister prefers to have dental work done without anaesthesia. However, that is no reason to demand everyone do it.

Pickup also expressed worry that people might bump themselves off because they felt too much of a burden. I look at it this way. If somebody finds being a burden even more awful than death, then who am I to condemn them to a fate they consider worse than death? I likely would not feel tortured in that situtation, but obviously they do. The compassionate solution is not to force them to suffer by cutting off their only escape route, but to help them over their guilt about being cared for.

Marie Of Montréal

This women’s dishonest and irrational way of debating suggests she is a member of some church and she is simply parroting the views of the church. She believes her church to have an exclusive hold on absolute truth, hence everyone should adopt those views. What she is doing has little to do with euthanasia and a lot to do with prosletysing. Whether someone’s views are rational or not has nothing whatsoever to do with their right to lobby for them. Most of the people against euthanasia are meddling religious busybodies who think they have a right to interfere in other people’s most personal choices. It is cosmically unfair that those most affected by euthanasia legislation have little energy to promote their views, and those with least interest and maximal nuttiness have the loudest voices.

Good Life, Gentle Death. David Lewis’s Suicide

In recent weeks pundits have pontificated on TV and in the press over David Lewis’s decision to commit suicide rather than face a lingering death. None of these men ever even met David. I was present the night David died. Here is what really happened Friday night August 24, 1990.

In some eyes, David is a coward and a sinner and I am a murderer for not interfering. If you were present, I think you would see it differently.

Before, when I heard people talk of death as a natural and even beautiful part of life, I thought them ghoulish. I still hate death, but now I can at least understand that point of view.

I know that the way David chose is the way I wish to die as well, eventually.

David was terminally ill with AIDS. He had a stroke so one side of his body was paralyzed, he was partially deaf and partially blind. He was incontinent. He could not eat any food without immediately throwing it up. He had a rapidly growing painful brain tumor, He had toxoplasmosis — a festering of the brain. He complained of the nausea and the pain of the brain tumor. He was expected to die within days or weeks.

David did not want to die. He enjoyed his life immensely, even to the very last second. Unfortunately, living was not one of the options. Two of the choices were:

1. Go into palliative care, go on higher doses of morphine, die "naturally" with tube up his nose in a hospital, become demented "gaga" to use his term, probably alone. He would be too weak to take charge of ending of his life no matter how intense the suffering.
2. Face the ultimate terror — death, surrounded with the comfort of his friends, in his home, with flowers, music, and gentle readings. He could say his last good-byes properly with full emotion. He would have to sacrifice a few days or weeks of suffering. He would have to face the moment of truth when he switched the IV that would eventually kill him.

The press have been phoning every few hours over the last week to ask "Is he dead yet?" The seven men and three women David chose to be with him do not want to be named. They wish to avoid media hassles and the potential of legal action. David wanted his death to have a greater meaning. He hopes his death will make it possible for other terminally ill people to die gently.

David held a barbecue last Sunday. Friends, sexual buddies and relatives came to say goodbye. We laughed and joked, and David told ribald stories of the distant and recent past and how one of his medications made him very horny.

The Friday night was much more subdued. David already had the IV in his arm that he put there himself. It was dripping harmless saline solution.

David kept asking, "What’s going to happen to me after I die? I don’t know, I just don’t know. I’m so scared. Probably nothing. Probably nothing at all — just poof."

I told him about all the myths I knew, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Tibetan etc. One person suggested that perhaps he would meet his lover Jimmy who died of AIDS last year. I wanted so badly for those myths to be true.

We joked that perhaps, like an Egyptian, he should take a small gold cat with him, or some change. Because of the Social Credit policy of making all experimental drugs free except those for AIDS patients, David detested Premier van der Zaalm right to the end. BC is the only province to attempt to reduce its NDP-voting gay population by charging $425 per month for drugs. If possible, David will haunt the premier’s theme park, Fantasy Gardens.

David talked of his experience, many years ago, when he was dead for a short time on the operating table, and how he did not want to come back to life then.

I told David, "Look, you have set up this theatrical event here. You don’t have to go through with it just because we all came. I think you are doing this too soon. I will not interfere. I want this to be 100% your decision. Don’t let anybody rush you. If you want to call this all off, or stall, it is fine with us. "

Other people said similar things, though with more heart. I nearly always sound like a robot.

One guy said, "You know this already David. I don’t want you to go. Please stay." Then he just started to cry and cry. We all cried.

David has a huge bed. We sat around it and in it. Someone wiped his forehead. Another massaged his foot. Another held his hand. He rested his head on one of the women’s breasts. David told us how frightened he was. Someone would say, "You don’t have to do this." Then he would firmly snap "But I have to! The alternative is too terrible."

We sat in silence. We would cry. David would tell a little joke and we would all giggle. Finally David said, I want you to leave the room. We each hugged him for the last time. David sobbed and clung to us. "I love you so much. I miss you all so much. I hate to leave all this love, but I have to" were his last words.

A few stayed behind. They read from Steven Levine’s "Who Dies" page 243. Louis Armstrong sang on a tape "It’s a Wonderful World". David changed the bag from saline to a sleeping potion. A while later he went peacefully to sleep. A while later he stopped breathing.

David was always the clown. I never saw him sentimental in the twenty years I knew him till that night. David died supremely happy, at first frightened, then peaceful.

David felt unconditionally loved. He received it before, but never felt it inside. When he threw up, no one batted an eyelid. He was still just as lovable. We adored him the way parents adore a new baby. David felt his own love for his friends more deeply then ever before at any time in his life. He made a proper and fitting farewell.

Outside during all this, a beautiful family of strangers stood a candlelight vigil. They held a sign "Your life is precious to us, we care, David." In his last hours David talked of his gratitude at the kindness of complete strangers who had sent good wishes or various unusual offers of comfort.

Some of us cleaned him up, put on fresh sheets and clothes. We all came downstairs. Mz. Brutus (his enormous basset hound) jumped up on the bed. David had asked that we allow Mz. Brutus to lick his face. She made snoring noises. I could not help but think "David — this is another of your practical jokes. You are not really dead. I can hear you snoring." It was like being five years old waiting as your sibling played dead — holding the breath. I held his arm. It felt cold, but it felt cold ever since the stroke. I felt his forehead. It was very cool. It took a long time for it to sink in that David really was dead. This body was not David. It looked like a respectable middle aged man — not the outrageous David I knew.

Then I began to feel joy. It was as if David was saying to me "I’ve escaped. I’m free of the suffering. I feel sorry you guys trapped in your bodies. " The real David, if he was anywhere at all, was somewhere else. The corpse seemed like a giant wax puppet, of no further importance.

David had asked that we toast him with Champagne. Nobody felt festive. Eventually we "followed orders" and toasted David. I took a glass down to him and put a few drops in his mouth. The gesture was irreverent, so I knew David would approve.

Love Roedy

Books

	recommend book⇒Final Exit : The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying
		paperback
	ISBN10:	0-440-50785-5
	ISBN13:	978-0-440-50785-7
	publisher:	Dell
	published:	1997-03-10
	by:	Derek Humphry
amazon.ca amazon.com chapters.indigo.ca powells.com amazon.fr barnesandnoble.com amazon.de amazon.co.uk

Rings

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