Euthanasia †Not Only at Patients Request :: Euthanasia Physician Assisted Suicide

Euthanasia – Not Only at Patient's Request      Ã‚   No indeed, euthanasia and assisted suicide would not only be at a patient's request. This false presumption has been disproven time and again by the practical working-out of euthanasia and assisted suicide in locales where it has been legalized. And yes, there are complications, which are not given great media exposure, but which appear in journals devoted to this debate. It is the intention of this essay to correct these false notions - with copious professional documentation.    As one of their major goals, euthanasia proponents seek to have euthanasia and assisted suicide considered "medical treatment." If one accepts the notion that euthanasia or assisted suicide is a good medical treatment, then it would not only be inappropriate, but discriminatory, to deny this good treatment to a person solely because that person is too young or mentally incapacitated to request it.    The way that the judicial process works in the United States is this: A surrogate's decision is often treated, for legal purposes, as if the patient had made it. That means that, if euthanasia is legal, a court challenge could result in a finding that a surrogate could make a request for death on behalf of a child or an adult who doesn't have decision-making capacity. Legally, this is the way the courts would handle it.    In the Netherlands, a 1990 government-sponsored survey found that .8% of all deaths in the Netherlands were euthanasia deaths that occurred without a request from the patient.(Medical) And in a 1995 study, Dutch doctors reported ending the lives of 948 patients without their request.(Hendin)    Suppose, however, that surrogates were not permitted to choose death for another and that doctors did not end patients' lives without their request. The fact still remains that subtle, even unintended, pressure would still be unavoidable. Such was the case with an elderly woman who died under Oregon's assisted suicide law: Kate Cheney, 85, reportedly had been suffering from early dementia. After she was diagnosed with cancer, her own physician declined to provide a lethal prescription for her. Counseling was sought to determine if she was capable of making health care decisions. A psychiatrist found that Mrs. Cheney was not eligible for assisted suicide since she was not explicitly pushing for it, her daughter seemed to be coaching her to do so, and she couldn't remember important names and details of even a recent hospital stay.