Source: Fredericksburg.com
By Dr. Thomas Eppes and Dr. Kurt Elward
WITH THE newly elected Virginia state legislature taking power in 2020, the debate over assisted suicide has returned to the General Assembly with a name change to disguise the real meaning.
The bill [Health Care Decision Making, HB 1649] introduced by Del. Kaye Kory, D–Fairfax, also intends to expand assisted suicide authority to nurse practitioners and physician assistants.
As physicians, we strongly oppose any effort to legalize physician-assisted suicide in Virginia or elsewhere. This also is the longstanding position of the Medical Society of Virginia and the American Medical Association.
Until January 2019, a bill to legalize assisted suicide had never even been introduced in Virginia—and for many good reasons. Where assisted suicide has been legalized, it undermines the physician–patient relationship, puts vulnerable people in danger, and is neither safe nor carefully regulated.
During medical school and residency, we were never taught how to kill any of our patients. We were trained to protect life and mentored to support families and patients with care and dignity at the end of their lives.
Diverse medical groups such as the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, and the World Medical Association oppose assisted suicide because physicians’ role to heal is incompatible with a license to kill.
These organizations have done a multi-year study of the ethics of assisted suicide before affirming their Code of Ethics against it within the last year.
When Washington, D.C., legalized assisted suicide in 2017, only two out of 11,000 licensed physicians had signed up to prescribe lethal drugs a year later, further demonstrating the medical community’s opposition to this practice.
Patients look to their physicians for cures, hope, and care. Physicians prescribing death undermine the trust in our profession.
In Oregon, about half of the people who have died by assisted suicide reported feeling like a burden to their friends and family. When physicians prescribe suicide, it creates a culture in which these vulnerable people are viewed as disposable. These individuals deserve care and protection, not pressure and discrimination.
Where it is legal, some insurers agree to pay for assisted suicide, but not other recommended treatments.
In northern Nevada, Dr. Brian Callister tried to transfer two patients to other hospitals for lifesaving procedures. In both cases, the insurance companies denied his requests. Instead, company representatives offered to provide his patients with life-ending drugs available in California and Oregon.
Proponents also claim there are robust safeguards in the assisted suicide legislation to protect patients, but it is clear these supposed safeguards are woefully inadequate.
Oregon does not monitor these statistics because the cause of death is never accurately reported. For example, if a patient with terminal lung cancer chooses to die by suicide, the cause of death is listed on the death certificate as lung cancer, not assisted suicide.
If that same patient got hit by a truck, the cause of death would be a motor vehicle accident, not the lung cancer.
If he decided to jump off a bridge, it would be correctly labeled as a suicide.
The bill mandates that the Virginia Board of Medicine not disclose evaluations of assisted suicide even though it is the standard to provide and promote accurate death certificates. If assisted suicide would be such a good thing, why shroud it in secrecy?
There is also a real slippery slope that we see worldwide. Although such legislation often limits euthanasia and assisted suicide to a last-resort option for a very small number of terminally ill people, some jurisdictions elsewhere now extend the practice to newborns, children, the mentally ill, and people with dementia.
In the Netherlands, it has recently been expanded to vague psycho-social stress. Assisted suicide chosen by the patient morphs into family-determined suicide, to doctor-determined suicide, and then to teenagers 14 and above choosing this fate if they are emotionally distressed.
To say this cannot happen in Virginia is forgetting the role that physicians played in the eugenics movement in the early 20th century. The physicians in Dr. Eppes’ hometown of Lynchburg knew what was going on at the state-run “Colony,” yet never raised a voice in protest.
Physician-assisted suicide degrades the value of human life and perpetuates the idea that patients with the most need for care and support are better off dead.
The consequences of legalizing assisted suicide legislation would be grave. Virginia’s legislators should keep in mind the dignity of society’s most vulnerable individuals and reject any legislation that would allow the practice.