This text is in response to the From Our Readers article, “Affirming Dignity: Arguments Towards Medical Help in Dying” by Joshua C. Briscoe, MD.
First, a touch upon a rhetorical maneuver: discussions of Nazi medical atrocities, whereas dramatic, haven’t any relevance to medical assist in dying (MAID). Likening it to barbaric and involuntary medical experimentation and homicide is equal to saying that voluntary vasectomies and tubal ligations needs to be banned due to previous pressured sterilization applications. Apples and oranges.
The majority of Joshua C. Briscoe, MD’s dialogue facilities on burdensomeness. Noting the impression of technological progress and overvaluing effectivity constitutes helpful social commentary. Certainly, as he notes, technological advances in medication contribute to the protracted decline in the direction of demise of many people that has triggered an curiosity in MAID.
Nonetheless, his assumption that the cult of effectivity is a crucial purpose why people select MAID requires proof. In my expertise with dying sufferers, their sense of being a burden is of a extra private and fewer sociological nature. They really feel burdened by their very own struggling and lack of dignity, as they outline it. They could additionally really feel they burden these they love, and never only for pragmatic causes. They’re regularly involved with the ache their family members will expertise watching them undergo by means of a protracted and painful demise. These sorts of burdens are actual and necessary to the person. To say that no particular person can in any sense or diploma ever be a burden is naïve and invalidating of an necessary dimension of human expertise.
Dr Briscoe argues that giving a alternative about whether or not to proceed dwelling could itself be an unwelcome burden on the person, as whether it is unfair to carry one liable for that call. We’re liable for each different main life determination we make… what makes this so completely different? Why is it higher to make docs or legislators liable for this determination? This argument resembles that infamous protection of slavery that posits that the slave is happier if freed from the burden of getting choices and simply does what they’re instructed. In addition to, if a given particular person really needs to be freed from the burden of those sorts of powerful selections, they’re free to entrust themselves to these opponents of MAID who will likely be completely happy to inform them the appropriate approach to reside and the appropriate approach to die.
Dr Heinrichs is a psychiatrist in Ellicott Metropolis, Maryland.