Brittany Maynard has revived the debate over Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act. The law lets terminally ill patients end their lives with the aid of a doctor. That Maynard is a pretty 29-year-old newlywed using her story to broaden support for such laws provokes and rankles foes of physician-assisted suicide. She also rejects the term “suicide.”
Maynard has a brain tumor, which extensive surgery failed to contain. Given six months to live about six months ago, she and her family moved to Oregon to obtain the right to shorten her suffering without resorting to deception. Washington, Montana, New Mexico and Vermont now permit doctor-assisted suicide, as well.
Foes of such laws make a slippery slope argument. The existence of this option, they say, would pressure sick people to kill themselves. But if you think about it, these laws can do the opposite. They can lessen a pressure that already exists.
It’s no secret that very sick people often shorten their painful lives with doctors helping them. And it’s no secret that, as the critics say, dying people sometimes feel pushed by heirs and exhausted caretakers to end their ordeal with a bottle of pills. But by bringing dying patients’ desire to end their lives into a legal framework of safeguards, such decisions can be contemplated with greater compassion and less deception.
The Oregon law insists that two physicians determine that the person will probably die in six months or less. Patients must be screened for depression and told of alternatives. And the patients must take the lethal prescription themselves.
Uncomfortable talk
Terminally ill people are often very depressed and socially isolated. And if they are surrounded by “loved ones” who, by their own notion of mercy, think an earlier death would be for the best, death-with-dignity laws can bring in outside guidance. If depression is making very sick people feel life is not worth continuing, that can be treated. And the patients can learn about other approaches to deal with pain.
This is an uncomfortable conversation but one that must be held. Terminal illness does not come with simplistic guidelines. That is doubly so in an era when medical technology can prolong a life in agonizing ways.
Nor are there easy political divisions between supporters and opponents of such laws. Libertarian conservatives support them as an expression of autonomy over one’s body.
A Gallup poll found a slim majority of Americans now regarding “doctor-assisted suicide” as morally acceptable. The percentage rises when “suicide” is replaced by a less emotional term. In another Gallup poll, 70 percent agreed that doctors should be allowed to end patients’ lives “by some painless means” if that’s the wish of the patients and their families.
Caring for the terminally ill creates ethical slopes going in all directions. What death-with-dignity laws can do, ironically, is apply some brakes to making such decisions. As such, they may offer the least slippery slope of them all.
Froma Harrop is a columnist for Creators.com. Email: fharrop@gmail.com.