D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A.
Executive Director
The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture recently responded to a proposed rule of the federal government. It was an opportunity to bring a reasoned voice to potential policy decisions. The full statement can be accessed here; the gist of the statement follows . . .
The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture supports human dignity for all humans, however vulnerable they may be. Our position is that 1) There should be NO overlap between hospice and assisted suicide; and 2) the term MAID should not be used to describe the promotion of, complicity with, or execution of Physician-assisted suicide.
1) There should be a bright red line between hospice and actions promoting, encouraging, making provision for, or acting to end the life of a patient. To that end, there should be a revocation of hospice when someone elects to die through physician-assisted suicide, whatever the specific jurisdiction may have labeled it. The State (in this case, the U.S. Federal government) should not be in the business of killing its citizenry via the medical establishment. Yet that is what would be happening if Medicare pays for physician-assisted suicide.
Hospice and physician-assisted suicide are incompatible, and they need to stay that way. Otherwise, the trust of the populace for hospice, which is tenuous already, would be irrevocably undermined. A thought experiment is in order. Consider that the chefs of a particular city are given permission to poison people who request such. The license, hanging on the wall for all the patrons to see, does not differ between those who poison upon request and those who do not. Now consider that you are visiting a restaurant in that city. How assured do you feel when you pick up your fork to taste your salad? Like chefs and poison, hospice and physician-assisted suicide do not go together, should not “overlap,” and should be separated by a bright red line.
2) Language is a very important part of being human. (That said, the inability to communicate via the spoken or written word, however, does not negate the humanity of the person so afflicted.) Language is used to communicate ideas and truth. Sadly, it can also be used to communicate propaganda and lies. The use of the term, MAID (or MAiD), “medical aid in dying,” is a case in point. Federal law prohibits the use of Federal funds for “causing, or assisting to cause, the death of any individual including mercy killing, euthanasia, or assisted suicide . . .”
What if a State calls it “MAID”? When a person or a political entity calls killing something other than what it is, that person or entity is using language either to lie or as propaganda. Such a euphemism as “medical aid in dying” may serve to save delicate ears from being offended, but the end result is a dead body nonetheless. It is decidedly not medical aid in dying; it is the misuse of the medical profession to kill other human beings, whatever the reason. It encourages some people to die; others, to kill. At the end of the day, it produces dead bodies. And it is vulnerable people and dead bodies with which we need to be concerned in this matter.
Causing the death of a patient has been forbidden from the Hippocratic practice of medicine for millenia. Physicians have forsworn killing patients over that same period of time. Physicians are trained appropriately as healers, not killers. Killing a patient– either through pills, an injection, or a prescription pad — is a moral wrong, and an offense against Hippocratic medicine. To cushion through euphemisms the meaning of the killing of another human is a disservice to all.