Condemning Assisted Suicide: Medical doctors Ought to Refuse to Take part in Killing Their Sufferers
Of course Governor Pritzker signed the assisted suicide bill. Was there ever any doubt? Assisted suicide has become part of the progressive policy agenda.
The new Illinois law (SB 1950) contains many of the usual provisions and supposed safeguards. Once the law goes into effect next September, these putative protections will quickly be redefined as “obstacles” to a good death and the inevitable process of legal loosening will commence.
This is the point at which I usually urge doctors to refuse participation in the killing of their patients. The law does permit doctors to refuse to actually prescribe poison (euphemistically called “medication”).
Click Like if you are pro-life to like the LifeNews Facebook page!
But it still appears to require that all doctors assess whether a patient who has asked for assisted suicide is “qualified,” and to be complicit by requiring them to discuss the availability of the option. From the statute:
Following the request of a patient for aid in dying, the attending physician [the MD in charge of treating the patient’s condition] shall conduct an evaluation of the patient and:
(1) determine whether the patient has a terminal disease or has been diagnosed as having a terminal disease; 2) determine whether a patient has mental capacity; (3) confirm that the patient’s request does not arise from coercion or undue influence; (4) inform the patient of:
(A) the diagnosis;
(B) the prognosis;
(C) the potential risks, benefits, and probable result of self-administering the prescribed medication to bring about a peaceful death
And here’s the faulty medical conscience provision (my emphasis added; as for no. 1, no problem there):
If a health care professional or health care entity is unable or unwilling to carry out an individual’s request for aid in dying, the professional or entity shall, at a minimum:
(1) inform the individual of the professional’s or entity’s inability or unwillingness;
(2) refer the individual either to a health care professional who is able and willing to evaluate and qualify the individual or to another individual or entity to assist the requesting individual in seeking aid in dying, in accordance with the Health Care Right of Conscience Act; and
(3) note, in the medical record, the individual’s date of request and health care professional’s notice to the individual of the health care professional’s unwillingness or inability to carry out the individual’s request.
In other words, all refusing doctors who are asked for assisted suicide must refer qualified patients to a doctor they know is willing to help kill and note in the records the date of the request, which starts the clock ticking for when the suicidal patient can receive the prescribed poison.
The bill also deploys a term I had not seen before: “Aid in dying care.” Facilitated suicide as “care,” Hippocratic Oath be damned.
We have entered a time in the West in which death often has greater gravitational pull than life. In this sense, the ongoing legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia — and the accelerating liberalization of laws already passed — are a painful symptom of a deep cultural malady afflicting us, not the malady itself.
LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D., is a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture and a bioethics attorney who blogs at Human Exeptionalism.
