…[A] growing share of Americans also believe individuals have a moral right to end their own lives. About six-in-ten adults (62%) say that a person suffering a great deal of pain with no hope of improvement has a moral right to commit suicide, up from 55% in 1990. A 56% majority also says this about those who have an incurable disease, up from 49% in 1990. While far fewer (38%) believe there is a moral right to suicide when someone is “ready to die because living has become a burden,” the share saying this is up 11 percentage points, from 27% in 1990. About a third of adults (32%) say a person has a moral right to suicide when he or she “is an extremely heavy burden on his or her family,” roughly the same share as in 1990 (29%).
Meanwhile, the public remains closely divided on the issue of physician-assisted suicide: 47% approve and 49% disapprove of laws that would allow a physician to prescribe lethal doses of drugs that a terminally ill patient could use to commit suicide. Attitudes on physician-assisted suicide were roughly the same in 2005 (when 46% approved and 45% disapproved).
Personal preferences about end-of-life treatment are strongly related to religious affiliation as well as race and ethnicity. For example, most white mainline Protestants (72%), white Catholics (65%) and white evangelical Protestants (62%) say they would stop their medical treatment if they had an incurable disease and were suffering a great deal of pain. (See the chart in Personal Wishes section below.) By contrast, most black Protestants (61%) and 57% of Hispanic Catholics say they would tell their doctors to do everything possible to save their lives in the same circumstances. On balance, blacks and Hispanics are less likely than whites to say they would halt medical treatment if they faced these kinds of situations.
Religious groups also differ strongly in their beliefs about the morality of suicide. About half of white evangelical Protestants and black Protestants reject the idea that a person has a moral right to suicide in all four circumstances described in the survey. By comparison, the religiously unaffiliated, white mainline Protestants and white Catholics are more likely to say there is a moral right to commit suicide in each of the four situations considered. There is a similar pattern among religious groups when it comes to allowing physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill.
The Pew Institute also polled Americans about how much time they had spent preparing on these issues and expressing their wishes to others.
I think Jack Kevorkian should NOT have gone to jail and that he should have been made a national hero. The misnomer Dr. Death is simply wrong. The older I get, the more strongly I believe that I have the right to decide when to check out. The state has the right to protect my life from predators, of course. However, when I make that decision, then I don’t think it is any longer the state’s business. I also believe we treat our pets and farm animals more kindly than we do our human loved ones. At some point, most of us who have own pets have to make that dread decision.
The sticky wicket becomes a matter of communication. Should we have total control over another in these life and death decisions? What has that person communicated to us? It is probably a darn good idea to have a living will that specifies what our personal wishes are about being kept alive, if we are no longer able to communicate our wishes. But what of those who don’t? Can our loved ones speak for us when our own wishes have not been documented?
Is this topic too sensitive or personal for a blog? I don’t think so. Those who feel it is can simply skip over the post. It might be a critical discussion to someone. I think Washington and Oregon are the only two civilized states in the nation. Those two states do allow for some degree of euthanasia. Again, why are the states involved in our most personal of decisions? Why have I lost the right to simply get a shot and be put to sleep like an old dog simply because I live in Virginia and not in Oregon?
Is this a religious question? Again, I don’t think so. I don’t know what my religion says about euthanasia, if anything. I think society and many religions frown on suicide in general but euthanasia is a little different. Euthanasia is considered when all hope of recovery is gone, at least in this country. It isn’t taken lightly nor is it considered in the same vein as suicide. (I stopped before typing “normal suicide.”)
What do our readers think? This subject can become another 800 lb gorilla in the room. Make sure you communicate your wishes to someone else.
While we may not choose to call it “euthanasia”, the practice of easing one out of life and into that great unknown we call death goes on daily. Patients may very well ask to be removed from treatment for a terminal condition and more often than we might be willing to believe, they are given sufficient amounts of sedatives to gently push them over the edge. Can I prove this? No, but it does go on and it is done in the guise of making sure the patient is pain free. Hospice care is not what you would truly classify as, “euthanasia” but it does give patients the opportunity to be relatively pain free and to live as well as possible until they can no longer live. I know that sounds like a sugarcoated statement but hospice is true. Patients are provided with a form of oral liquid morphine and advice to use it as often as they need it and to not try to maintain some rigid schedule for taking it. Is this, “euthanasia”? You will have to be the judge of that.
I do have to add a note of caution. I nearly lost my wife because an emergency room physician told me there was nothing they could do for my wife but keep her comfortable because she would be dead before the end of the day after having suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke. When I asked him if there was nothing they could do, he said it was all on God’s hands. I told him I thought God lived at INOVA Fairfax. We had her transferred there and she is alive and doing very well. Yes, euthanasia can be the right thing but, “Sententia plasmator caveo”.
In much older patients, the morphine for pain also shallows the breathing, according to my mother’s physicians. I don’t think it was a wink wink as much as it was just a by product. I feel confident my mother would have liked to be “put to sleep like an old dog.” In fact, I pretty much got my beliefs from her words over the years.
“Patients are provided with a form of oral liquid morphine and advice to use it as often as they need it and to not try to maintain some rigid schedule for taking it.”
Any suggestion that hospice provides some kind of back-door, wink-nod euthanasia is absolutely, categorically false, unless you were working with some disreputable providers. The primary goal is pain relief and quality of life, and NOT hastening death. I worked for a hospice for a few years, and still have a number of colleagues who do so now. I would know.