|
'Nothing in the bill prohibits this horror' Posted: August 29, 2008
Campaign for Children and Families Just as Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama was in Denver
preaching to a crowd of thousands of fans about the "change" he wants to
see in the United States, his party compatriots in the California
Legislature were making a "change," by approving a controversial plan
that would allow nurses to assist terminally ill patients with suicide.
"AB 2747 allows a physician assistant or a nurse to opine that a patient
is 'terminal,' and then push for unnatural death by 'palliative
sedation,'" said Randy Thomasson, chief of the Campaign for Children and
Families shortly after the vote. "Depressed patients who succumb to this pressure will be drugged
unconscious and die from dehydration, usually within five to 10 days.
Nothing in the bill prohibits this horror," he said. Forty-two Democrats in California voted in favor of the plan: 30
Republicans and two Democrats opposed the plan. "AB 2747 pushes suicide through the back door at the hands of
non-physicians taking advantage of depressed patients," Thomasson said.
His organization has been alerting Californians to raise their concerns
about the plan for sudden death with floor alerts, phone calls and e-mails. "AB 2747 cheapens the value of human life by endorsing suicide as an
option. Gov. Schwarzenegger should pledge to veto this very dangerous
bill," Thomasson said, describing how the author, Assemblywoman Pattie
Berg of Eureka, "deceptively changed" the bill to appear that
"voluntarily stopping of eating and drinking" and "palliative sedation"
no longer were on a list of "symptom management" options. But the final bill "is broad enough to easily include these suicide
techniques," Thomasson said. The specific references to those treatments simply were changed to
"other clinical treatments useful when a patient is actively dying." According to the CCF report, Assemblyman Van Tran of Costa Mesa warned
the bill has no protections for patients "who could be mistakenly
diagnosed as 'terminally ill' but would have many, many full years of
life ahead." "The bill does not otherwise attempt to expressly define terminal
illness that each of these health care professionals would have to
diagnose to trigger the offer of counseling end of life options. It is
not clear why nurse practitioners and physician assistants could make
such a significant diagnosis. It is further not clear from the bill how
making such significant diagnoses on a case-by-case basis can be done by
such practitioners and assistants based on so-called 'standardized
procedures and protocols' not further defined by the bill. The potential
effect of AB 2747 is extremely broad and could cause irrevocable harm." Added Republican Doug La Malfa of Yuba City: "We really go down a
slippery slope when we contemplate the ending of life in such a way that
it could be coerced. You have people in a very precarious situation, in
a very awkward situation, that when thrust upon them with options to end
their life, you have people that may feel like they have no use anymore.
They feel like they're not of value anymore, and that taking one of
these options, they may feel, is the only way out, that they've become a
burden to their family or to someone else. I would hate to put people in
that kind of position. They're already feeling vulnerable, and now,
confronted with ways to end your life – this is a very delicate and, I
think, dangerous idea here. You could have people like heirs that are
anxious to get the estate started and quietly coercing people into
making decisions like this." "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)," wrote Dr. Howard M. Ducharme, past chair of the
philosophy department at the University of Akron. "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. However, any quick acceptance of TS would be
ill-advised because of the many 'devils in the details.'"
Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites  |
