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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Liberty Also Means Release From Painful, Degrading Limbo

Fred Glienna Special To Roundtable

I think there should be a statue of Dr. Jack Kevorkian in every public park in this country.

This week’s decision by the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to set aside Washington state’s ban on physician-assisted suicide is an enlightened ruling. Instead of being anti-life it is a tribute to the true worth of human dignity.

One of the unpleasant concomitants of our technological society is that we prolong suffering, using the very means that allow us to promote life. You can be kept alive by “heroic” means, brain-dead and unaware, for months, even years.

Medicines allow us to linger on and on, often bereft of any scrap of human dignity and self-respect. Our families and friends witness the inevitable decline, hoping, hoping for a miracle. Terminal diseases may be slowed but not stopped in their fatal work on us. Along comes Dr. Jack Kevorkian, or others like him, who would end useless human suffering and ease the final passage of piteous wrecks.

Physicians are sworn to preserve life; it’s in the Hippocratic oath. How then do we allow certain doctors to appoint themselves seeming gods, ending life when they’re supposed to protect it?

Simply put, there are medical cases, lots of them, where the patients are doomed and have no hope except for a speedy, if not easy, end.

It is human, all too human, to want to hang on to a loved one, even if only a shadow of that person is left. Death is final, and we are creatures of hope who want to stave off that painful, wrenching last moment.

Assisted-suicide people are not insensitive to the tricky moral waters they are sailing. They know there are dramatic medical advances, new drugs, new procedures, and that there will be more spectacular surgeries in the future. They know a patient can linger in a coma for a long time and then recover. They know that sometimes there are inexplicable reversals and remissions. They know that untreatable cancers sometimes take years and years to kill, and that in the meantime a cure might be found.

Proponents of assisted suicide do not want to administer lethal injections at the first sign of a fatal disease. They are not reckless, these, as we call them melodramatically, “doctors of death.” But when a terminal patient begins to suffer unendurable pain, when a terminal patient loses those intellectual capacities that make us human, when a terminal patient slides so far toward death that no reversal is remotely probable - then, in those cases where that patient has done serious thinking and evaluating while still able to, and has opted for merciful help to the final curtain, then it is time for the gentle intervention the dying person has requested.

Many states provide for living wills, documents that instruct that no “heroic measures” be used to prolong life when chances for recovery are nil. Allowing doctors, reviewed by peers and with the supervisory eye of the courts, to assist in suicides of those patients who have given informed consent is mercy in the truest sense.

But suicide, we are told, is a sin. Decades ago, euthanasia was rejected in England for just that reason: A patient’s consent was tantamount to suicide.

I submit that no god worthy of worship would prefer to see his creations persist in pointless, prolonged suffering.

Might not assisted suicide someday be used to weed out the old, the infirm, the impoverished? That is a real concern and the reason many people oppose what Dr. Kevorkian does. Once you open the door to euthanasia, how do you keep the door from flying right off its hinges?

All life is sacred; every human life is irreplaceable and full of meaning. Doctors know this and fight for every patient with all the knowledge, tenacity and craft at their command.

But when the suffering is great and the outcome inevitable, those who have so chosen must be allowed the dignity of a speedy and pain-free exit. They need to reflect greatly before they choose this path, with counselors, doctors and family members all participating.

We need as a society permanent, strong safeguards to prevent this merciful process from degenerating into any sort of wholesale “cleansing.” But we also need to consider the sweet benefits of ending pain where there is no hope.

The 9th Circuit Court put it brilliantly and succinctly in its opinion: “A competent, terminally ill adult, having lived nearly the full measure os his life, has a strong liberty interest in choosing a dignified and humane death rather than being reduced at the end of his existence to a childlike state of helplessness, diapered, sedated, incompetent.”

Bravo. Mercy and compassion demand no less.

xxxx