The ethical (medical) status of "Medical Aid in Dying"

Letter to New York Senators and Assembly Members.

Gordon Friesen

Honorable Senators and Assembly Members,

The "Medical aid in dying Act" (NY A.995/S.2445) is critically dependent upon a radical vision of assisted death as normal medical care. Conversely, to negate that assumption is to disqualify A.995/S.2445.

The agreed nature of ethical medicine

As stated by Dr. Sharon Quick (President of the Physicians for Compassionate Care Education Foundation): "Health care professionals, not patients, determine treatment options and patients choose among them..."

It would thus appear that assisted death is completely at odds with accepted medical practice.

For even if death-by-choice were admitted as a universal right, it could never be ethical for doctors to spontaneously propose death-as-medical-treatment: considering that there is no objective agreement on what clinical circumstances might indicate its use (other than politically established eligibility criteria); and considering further: the extreme hazard of professionally promoted suicidal suggestion.

Similarly, as Dr. Quick continues: "...physicians routinely deny patient requests that risk harm to self, others, or society."

But once again we strike a fatal contradiction. For Medical Aid in Dying is invariably presented as a sovereign right of claimable entitlement!

It thus appears that assisted death stands quite apart from generally admitted norms of medical practice, in both of these crucial respects. For unlike any example of "normal" medical action: Medical Aid in Dying may be neither ethically proposed (by doctors), nor legally denied (save personal conscience exemptions only).

Ideas have consequences

Nor are these merely philosophical concerns... To pass a Bill such as A.995/S.2445 is not only to permit the assertion of a false medical premise. It is to impose, also, the tragic conclusions of that premise in clinical practice.

For under this new ethical paradigm, even physicians who believe that euthanasia is not appropriate (in some given instance) would still be obliged to perilously raise that possibility (in accordance with accepted standards of complete patient information); whereas physicians who do embrace the new ethos (including even those in fatal conflict of interest as stewards of the public purse) would be free to maximize the impact of that practice, as only their special status of professional expertise might allow.

In short, NY Bill A.995/S.2445 presents an extreme danger to medicine (as a self-regulating ethical and scientific enterprise); to the moral agency of doctors (as ethical professionals); to patients (in their physical security); and to all of society (in its humanitarian mission).

Honorable Members and Senators: Please defeat A.995/S.2445

Respectfully yours,

Gordon Friesen, President, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Co-Signers

Colleen E. Barry, Chairperson EPC-USA

Josephine L.A. Glaser, MD.,FAAFP

Meghan Schrader

Kenneth Stevens, MD

William Toffler, MD

Alex Schadenberg