Death with Dignity: What do we advise our clients? Letters to the editor in response.
King County Bar Bulletin, June, 2009 Source
To the Editor:
Thank you for running Margaret Dore's article discussing the down sides of Washington's new Death with Dignity Act, which legalizes physician-assisted suicide. I am a physician who has studied assisted suicide and euthanasia since 1988, especially in the Netherlands. I agree with Ms. Dore that patient "choice" is not always the case.
Dutch doctors have practiced assisted suicide and euthanasia for decades. Although the law calls for performing assisted suicide and euthanasia with the patient's consent, it is often involuntary. The law also calls for obtaining a second opinion of another physician, but this is often never done.
By 1991, the Remmelink Report showed that 1,040 people (an average of three per day) were actively killed by Dutch doctors without the patient's knowledge or consent. In addition, 8,100 patients died as a result of doctors deliberately giving them overdoses of pain medication, not for the primary purpose of controlling pain, but to hasten the patient's death. This pattern continues to this day.
Early death can save money for health-care systems as well as for surviving family members. Once assisted suicide is accepted, abuses are possible and difficult to control. Those who believe that Washington's new assisted-suicide act will assure their "choice" are naive.
William Reichel, M.D. Center for Clinical Bioethics Georgetown University School of Medicine Washington, D.C.
To the Editor:
Was it a coincidence that Margaret Dore's sobering article on Washington's new assisted-suicide law appeared in the same issue as "The Case of the Defrauded Elder" and "Violent Crime Stats Raise Alarm: Elderly Women Most Vulnerable?" Each article describes the vulnerability of the elderly and ill and the difficulty of protecting even the wealthy and powerful from abuse. Ms. Dore's article exposes the lack of safeguards in the so-called Death with Dignity Act, which provides a new mechanism for the worst form of abuse by those whose financial interests neatly dovetail with the expedited death of a loved one.
Sadly, Ms. Dore's analysis is accurate. The strategic vagueness of the language in the statute has been largely ignored. With no requirement that the death be witnessed, or that the patient himself/herself administer the lethal dose, or even that the patient be competent at the time of ingesting the lethal dose, the dignified death promised by the statute's title may be anything but.
Theresa Schrempp SONKIN & SCHREMPP, PLLC