SACRAMENTO, May 29, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An assisted-suicide bill that allows doctors and nurses to suggest death by unconscious dehydration has barely passed the California State Assembly.
AB 2747 would authorize total sedation without nutrition and hydration for depressed and confused patients, whether or not their natural death was imminent. The bill would also allow family members to order the death of a mentally disabled person when a nurse opines they have less than a year to live, similar to Terry Schindler Schiavo’s death at the hands of her husband.
AB 2747 passed the Democrat-controlled Assembly Wednesday afternoon on a 41-32 vote, a one-vote margin of victory in the 80-member lower house. The vote was virtually party line, Democrats for, Republicans against. AB 2747 is authored by the same Democrats who unsuccessfully carried physician-assisted suicide bills for the last three years.
“This deceptive bill will cause death and shorten life, despite its claims,” said Randy Thomasson, president of Campaign for Children and Families, a leading California-based pro-life, pro-family organization. “Drying up and shriveling to death through dehydration is a fate worse than lethal injection. By transforming palliative sedation into a vehicle for assisted suicide, AB 2747 would transform doctors and nurses from healers and comforters into killers like Dr. Jack Kevorkian.”
AB 2747 would allow a doctor or a nurse to opine that a patient has “less than one year to live,” and then ask depressed patients if they would like to be totally sedated into unconsciousness. Total sedation is usually an irreversible procedure that does not include nutrition and hydration. If patients or decision-making family members fall prey to suggestions of total sedation, death from dehydration will usually occur within five days.
Total sedation (TS) — called by some “terminal sedation,” “palliative sedation,” or “slow euthanasia” — is a protocol recently added to the lexicon of contemporary medical interventions and is a construct actively promulgated by the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO). It is defined as “the application of pharmacotherapy to induce a state of decreased or absent awareness (unconsciousness) in order to relieve the burden of otherwise intractable suffering.” With only this much said, there may seem to be no ethical objection to TS — a patient who is terminally ill, imminently dying, and suffering overwhelming physical pain may simply request temporary TS to get some sleep today with the hope that the pain will be endurable tomorrow. However, any quick acceptance of TS would be ill-advised because of the many “devils in the details.”
TS is not limited to patients with terminal illness who are imminently dying. The NHPCO’s policy explains that TS can be used “in the last day or two of life,” but it can also be used “at multiple points” in a “patient’s trajectory toward death,” when the patient is not imminently dying. Thus, TS is not limited by standard clinical criteria as put forth in the AMA’s policy on forgoing life-sustaining treatment (FLST) — i.e., that the patient be terminally ill and imminently dying.
Read the entire article at Lifesite News.
Filed under: Assisted Suicide, Euthanasia, Michael Schiavo, Terri Schiavo | Closed
