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May 27, 2005
Suicide isn’t answer
I’m sorry to see legalized physician-assisted suicide (AB654) moving forward for several reasons:
— Consistently, as nurses, we see that when symptoms are well-controlled, people want to live, not die, regardless of their prognosis.
— This bill turns the physician from healer to indirect slayer, but slayer nonetheless, in a breach of the historical patient-physician covenant.
— If the primary intent is to give patients autonomy in their care, then terminal illness has nothing to do with whether or not a person should receive lethal prescriptions.
— Research suggests that physicians are not able to accurately predict length of life.
— Will Medicare pay, and for whom?
— AB654 authors have asserted, but have established no connection between dignity and killing.
There are a host of other reasons.
Of course, I could hypothesize that AB654 has an economic upside for California. No longer will we need to pay expensive end-of-life care for those whom we can convince to die, nor will we have to spend resources to determine how to manage difficult symptoms.
Budget-conscious agencies and insurers can lower their costs by suggesting assisted suicide to their expensive patients, particularly those with few financial resources.
Patients, who fear being a financial burden to their families, may consider suicide their duty.
All of these things can be accomplished with “a wink and a nod” in undocumented conversations with patients.
I encourage you to oppose AB654 and to contact the governor about it by calling 916-445-2841, faxing 916-445-4633, or e-mailing http://www.govmail.ca.gov.
— Martha Highfield, Agoura Hills
(The writer, a registered nurse with a Ph.D., is a professor of nursing at California State University, Northridge. — Editor)
When my mother was in a nursing home dying of COPD, she was so weak that she could not even turn the channel selector on the TV that I had placed by her bed. She told me that she was miserable, had no hope of recovery, and that if she could, she would put her fist through the TV screen and slit her wrists on the broken glass. She stopped eating and the nursing home wanted to insert a feeding tube. She and I both fought them on that. She died a few days later, not of starvation but of COPD. When I think about a bill like this one, I think about my mother and countless others who are in constant agony as they await the death that is certain.
Posted by: William at May 27, 2005 12:25 PM