“The Evil Effects of Legalizing Euthanasia & Physician-Assisted-Suicide”

Here is this week's installment of my ongoing essay series about contemporary bioethics issues. As always, your comments and clarifications are welcome. Here is a list of the previous topics I've treated:

• “The Moral Implications of Artificial Wombs”
• “Mandatory Organ Donation Initiatives”
• “Human-Animal Hybrids and the Catholic Response”

“The Evil Effects of Legalizing Euthanasia & Physician-Assisted-Suicide”

The Catholic Church has long taught that euthanasia is immoral. The Second Vatican Council (Gaudium et Spes #27) condemned all crimes against life including “any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or willful suicide.” Because euthanasia violates the divine law, it will always and in every case be wrong. Moreover, in 1980, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a “Declaration on Euthanasia” which, besides repeating the Church’s perennial teaching, called upon those who work in the medical profession to make “all their skill available to the sick and dying … [as well as to provide] the comfort of boundless kindness and heartfelt charity” to all their patients.

The legalization of euthanasia and physician-assisted-suicide (PAS) not only violates the divine law and the dignity of the human person, it also violates the responsibility of health care professionals. In October 2005, a joint statement was issued by doctors and lawyers against the legalization of PAS in Canada. The authors collect an impressive selection of statistics and arguments making the case that legalized PAS initiates a “slippery slope” that inevitably leads to the abuse of patients and inferior care for the sick and dying.

Using evidence primarily from the state of Oregon, Belgium, and the Netherlands, the authors demonstrate how legalized PAS has resulted in an overall reduction of patient autonomy (killing patients who have not requested it), puts pressure on patients to end their life prematurely (because they feel themselves to be a burden), changes social attitudes about death and erodes a culture’s respect for life, and causes the medical profession to abandon or weaken its orientation towards preserving life.

Revealingly, the joint statement shows that most patients who request euthanasia are actually clinically depressed, and that when their underlying cause of depression (or pain) is alleviated, they frequently reverse their decision to end their life. Finally, the joint statement makes the point that far from a “good death”, euthanasia often results in a prolonged, painful and undignified passing.

Recently, a study published in the October issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics claimed that it could find no evidence to support the fears that legalized euthanasia has an impact on vulnerable people. Although the original text of this article was not yet available, the overview provided by HealthDay News contains some significant difficulties and the information it provides is woefully inadequate for those wishing to form a conclusions about the arguments. Three problematic sentences will be analyzed.

The first line reads: “Legalizing doctor-assisted suicide does not lead to a ‘slippery slope’ of excess deaths among the vulnerable poor, uninsured, elderly or other patients.” The term “excess deaths” here is an odd one to use. How, exactly, are “excess deaths” to be defined? The sentence also focuses upon the fear that a certain demographic represents an undue proportion of the assisted-suicide cases. This fact alone is irrelevant. The joint statement mentioned previously shows that all demographics risk an erosion of their best interests. When euthanasia is a legal option, it negatively influences the range of medical options given to the patient; much like the legalization of abortion could be argued to have negatively influenced the range of medical options given to mothers with an unwanted pregnancy.

A second line reads: "In the first nine years after the Oregon law took effect in the 1990s, 456 people received lethal prescriptions from doctors … that's 0.15 percent of all deaths in Oregon during those nine years, the researchers said.” Just because the proportion of PAS cases is low when compared to the general population does not mean that each of those cases was “legitimate.” One could say, for instance, that murders represented a low number of the total deaths in a state without in any way proving murder to be acceptable. A “slippery slope”, after all, is a slow, steady degeneration of principles.

The final line reads: “In both Oregon and The Netherlands, people who received a doctor's help to die were an average of 70 years old, and 80 percent were cancer patients.” This sentence tries to allay fears by stating that a) most people that were euthanized were old and b) most people who were euthanized had cancer. This sentence seems to operate on the premise that it is acceptable for elderly and sick people to die.

Such woefully-inadequate reporting does no service to furthering the debate, and fails to scratch the service of the significant body of evidence demonstrating the evil effects of legalized PAS. Wherever evil is done, even by ignorant or compromised agents, society suffers its ill effects. +++

Related/topical: Church rejects creation of bioethics committee on euthanasia (CNA)