LIFEAlerts

On March 28, 2022, Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum entered into a settlement agreement that guaranteed the non-enforcement of the residency requirement in Oregon’s “Death with Dignity Act.” This statute limited physician-assisted suicide access to residents of Oregon. Oregon Right to Life Executive Director, Lois Anderson, warns against the short physician-patient relationships and the push to eliminate any waiting period for life-ending drugs. He says that the residency requirement at least protected some patients from predatory practices going unnoticed in the current execution of the law. “Oregon has launched its new industry—death tourism.”

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Natural law is not a physical law or a law that man has imposed on himself. It is a universal moral law, intrinsic to man, instilled in his conscience. We have all heard children exclaim “that’s not fair!” or shared similar emotions over international events. These experiences show the commonality of an awareness of good and evil. This allows us to conclude two things: Human life is sacred; all men have a common destiny and a common law instilled in their consciences. If human life is sacred, then anything that protects, for example the prohibition of murder; is good. The idea that there is no objective law is a disastrous manifestation of the current postmodern relativism.

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The statement is that patients with terminal anorexia nervosa deserve the same attendant care and rights as all other patients with terminal illness. The article studies three cases to elucidate this condition then proposes clinical characteristics for a terminal eating disorder: diagnosis of anorexia nervosa, older age (over 30), previous participation in high quality care, and clear and consistent determination by a patient who possesses decision-making capacity. What doors will be opened if “terminal” is redefined?

The bioethics writer Wesley J. Smith argues in the National Review “When psychiatrists give up on their mentally ill patients — and indeed, are allowed to help them commit suicide — who will defend the value and continued importance of their lives?”.

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An amendment to the Government’s Health and Care Bill sought to force the Government into drafting an assisted suicide bill within a year of the Health and Care Bill becoming law. The Association of Palliative Medicine (APM) has warned that the public is being “scared” into supporting assisted suicide through an excessive focus by the media on cases of suffering at end-of-life, This can lead to the perception that there is no hope and create the false choice between a painful, drawn-out and unnecessarily unpleasant death and assisted suicide or euthanasia. But this is not the case at all. Good palliative care is, or should be, an option for everyone at the end of life.

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Freud correlatively differentiates between three fundamental prohibitions, three universal taboos which form the basis of the conditions of existence of culture: the taboos of cannibalism, incest and murder. Since the dawn of human history, this triple prohibition separates the state of culture from the state of nature, writes Freud.

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It has been argued that the legalisation of medical assistance in dying would decrease or, at least, not have an effect on suicide rates. David Albert Jones, Director of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre in Oxford, published a study in The Journal of Ethics in Mental Health showing the opposite. In Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium there have been very steep rises in suicide compared with those of neighboring non-EAS states. In Switzerland suicide rates have approximately doubled from 1998 to 2017. The data from Europe is not reassuring: The non-assisted suicide rates have not declined relative to comparable non-EAS countries, whereas there have been very large increases in suicide (inclusive of assisted suicide) and intentional self-initiated death, especially among women.

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In France, the public debate about the legalisation of assisted suicide, is raging. In December 2021, psychiatrists published a study that reconsidered the role of psychiatrists in dealing with requests for medical aid in dying. The study was based on 127 articles obtained mostly from Pubmed and Cairn, from 1997 to 2020 in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg and Oregon. It emphasized that an in-depth visit with a psychiatrist should be provided in all cases, given that the most prevalent reasons for a request to die are “spirituality, attachment style, social isolation, despair, depression […]. Factors, such as a doctor’s qualifications, influence the psychiatric evaluation and can obscure the motivations that lead a person to request assisted suicide.

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In December 2021 Dignitas, a Swiss organisation that promotes “the right to die with dignity”, submitted a Preliminary Question of Constitution (PQC) countering the ban of pentobarbital in France. Pentoparbital is used in Switzerland and Belgium for assisted suicide. On 21 December 2021 the French Council rejected the proposal highlighting the risks of pentobarbital to public healthcare.

Dignitas prides itself on its role in having assisted suicide recognised by the German and Austrian constitutional courts; it attempted to archive this in France, but thus far failed. It’s website explicitly criticises France for its suicide prevention policy;  indicating the association’s ideology to strive to impose its deadly practices in foreign countries.

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