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The tragic Montana Supreme Court’s ruling today regarding physician assisted suicide is revealing how far judges will go to twist truth to fit their agenda. We are fortunate they ruled against their being a constitutional right to physician suicide, thereby vacating District Justice Dorothy McCarter’s decision in 2008. However, when they state there is nothing in “Montana statues indicating that physician aid in dying is against public policy,” they open the door to its promotion by removing any penalty for physicians involved in such actions.
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Physician assisted suicide violates Montana homicide laws and the ethical policies of the Montana Medical Association. As Justice Jim Rice stated in the dissenting opinion, assisting suicide has been explicitly prohibited by Montana law for 114 years. He wrote, “In my view, the court’s conclusion is without support, without clear reason, and without moral force.”
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Beyond Montana, physician assisted suicide is against the policies of the AMA and the Hippocratic Oath, and there is not only state, but national precedent for its prohibition. Laws throughout the history of this nation have prohibited suicide. Laws against suicide are based on our nation’s founding principle that life comes from God, as the Declaration of independence asserts, not from government and not from us. Autonomy and freedom do not include the right to do harm to other humans, including to ourselves.
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The upside of today’s decision is that physician assisted suicide was not declared a constitutional right. They did not successfully utilize the “privacy clause” in Montana’s constitution, like they have used it to trample on any legislative gains against abortion.
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November 2010 elections will likely bring an overwhelming majority of prolife conservative candidates to both houses of the legislature, plus the personhood amendment. Following that, the 2011 Legislative session will result in statutes against physician assisted suicide and abortion. Montanans do not support degradation of human life, and we will be progressively victorious over the culture of death.
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Dr. Keener promotes physician assisted suicide and apparently euthanasia so that a person doesn’t die alone. Whether or not a person dies alone depends more on the value of life a culture promotes than on the willingness of a physician to stand by their side while they give a lethal injection. It is reasonable to conclude that the elderly and the sick are less likely to die alone if their families live in a culture that promotes the intrinsic value of every human being.
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Dr. Keener builds the case for physician assisted suicide by tugging at our emotions with details of human suffering in the dying process. What he doesn’t tell you is that current medical technology is capable of controlling pain to a great extent and that giving high doses of pain medications is legal and moral. They can be given in progressive doses if that is required to control pain, even if those high doses contribute to death. That is not considered assisted suicide. Furthermore, a bottle of a certain over-the counter medication will more assuredly bring death than any combination of pills a suicide assisting physician prescribes. Since Dr. Keener knows that over-the-counter medication is all that’s needed to kill oneself, it follows that promotion of secular humanism and getting the medical field on board with it are his true agenda rather than death with dignity.
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The sacred trust between physician and patient will be severely eroded if euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are legalized. Death is a much easier and cheaper option than lovingly caring for the dying individual, and legalization opens the door to coercion and even forced euthanasia for those individuals deemed unworthy of life.
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Through the vehicle of government-run media and schools, this culture has shifted to the secular humanist ideology. It is imposed on our population. We need to shift back to our foundational principles. Laws help advance and protect what a society values. Since we need laws and laws inevitably impose morality, it seems prudent to promote laws that are based on uncompromised reverence for the dignity and worth of each human person no matter what their physical state. Laws and judicial opinions that support physician assisted suicide devalue human life and need to be emphatically opposed.
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Dr. Annie Bukacek MD |