Medical Ethics Advocate Opposes Vermont Bill Legalizing Euthanasia
by Mary Rettig and Jenni Parker
April 4, 2005
(AgapePress) - The president of a medical ethics group in Vermont says his state is looking to be the next to allow physician-assisted suicide. A bill before the Vermont legislature would allow doctors to prescribe a lethal dose of drugs for an adult who requests it and has a prognosis of less than six months to live.The legislation (listed as H318 in the House and S112 in the Senate) proposes to allow mentally competent patients who are expected to die within six months to end their lives in a "humane and dignified manner" by taking prescription medication. Also, according to the bill, the patient cannot be depressed.
Dr. Robert Orr is a member of the Christian Medical & Dental Associations and the head of the Vermont Alliance for Ethical Healthcare. Both groups advocate humane and life-affirming medical treatment and research while opposing practices such as euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, or PAS.
Orr feels there is no need for the Vermont legislature to pass H318 and S112 since patients in the state already have the right to refuse treatment when they are dying. "And secondly," he notes, "I think we should be using our efforts and energy to help people during the dying process -- to treat their pain and their shortness of breath and their social and psychological and spiritual concerns. We should be helping them through the dying process, not helping them to die."
The biggest concern Orr has with the legislation, he says, is its potential for abuse. The physician says he has no doubt, if the law were enacted and PAS legalized in Vermont, that expansion of the criteria for euthanasia would inevitably follow. As an example of the pattern, he points to THE ever-more alarming culture of death that exists in the Netherlands, where euthanasia has been legal for 20 years.
In hospitals in the Netherlands already, many physicians are making life and death decisions based on their assessment of a patient's quality of life or life expectancy. And, after admitting to killing more than 20 newborns since 1997 alone, Dutch doctors are asking their government to expand legalized euthanasia even further. The physicians claim the babies they have killed were facing unbearable suffering had they been allowed to live, and the doctors are hoping relaxed government restrictions will give them even more latitude to decide which patients should live and which should die.
Proponents of the Vermont legislative measure say PAS helps terminally ill patients, who would otherwise suffer an agonizing death. However, Dr. Orr says many of these advocates of so-called mercy killing are not looking at all of the options. "Experts in palliative care tell us that there is no need for people to die a miserable death," he points out, "because we can treat the pain. We can treat the shortness of breath, we can treat the bowel and bladder symptoms, the vomiting, and many symptoms that occur."
Although the CMDA physician admits the health-care community in Vermont needs to do a better job of easing the transition for dying patients, he notes that in fact, "the Vermont Alliance for Ethical Healthcare has been working very hard at trying to improve things through making stronger advance directives and improving pain management. So we're really working at the ethically preferable alternative."
Orr insists there is no reason the Vermont legislature should even be considering making physician-assisted suicide legal. The potential for abuse of PAS is too great, he asserts, and healthcare professionals' energy would be better and more ethically spent helping patients live with dignity to the end rather than helping them hasten death.
