On Nov. 1, a terminally ill glioblastoma brain cancer patient took her own life. That patient’s name was Brittany Maynard. At the age of 29, she chose to end her life using drugs legally provided to her by a physician in her home state of Oregon. And with her passing, the debate surrounding assisted suicide has been re-ignited.
In Maynard’s death, we see a personal decision made by a mentally fit individual. And this decision has come to highlight the failings of this nation’s policies regarding end-of-life issues. It has laid bare a simple reality — we can no longer accept the poorly defined ethical doctrine that has come to dominate the politics of death and dying. Instead, we must demand the right to exercise our own autonomy regarding this most fundamental issue of our humanity.
State and federal policies should support, not hinder, this process. The right to die with dignity should become as universal and important a human right as any other. We should all be afforded the opportunity to address our own deaths without fear of legal or moral backlash.
The right-to-die movement faces criticism from some people in the medical community who hold that such policies inherently violate the Hippocratic oath. The notion is a simple one: How can physicians who have sworn to do no harm provide the means for patients to take their own lives?
But this question presupposes the beneficial nature of end-of-life treatments, a notion that is not entirely true. In 2009, American patients spent roughly $50 billion on medical treatments during the last two months of their lives. It is estimated that some 20 to 30 percent of those treatments offered no meaningful impact on the health of the patients that received them.
With many doctors offering treatment regimens that provide fleeting benefits, the logical leap to offering patients an option to choose the terms of their own death seems far less out of proportion. Ultimately, such a leap would be made on the grounds of quality of life for those patients. This sentiment is a vital one — saying that medical procedures simply prolong life is not sufficient to validate their inherent usefulness.
A medical procedure that promises prolonged suffering should no longer be viewed as more legal or valid than an option that may end that suffering. With death as such a salient reality, terminally ill patients should not be pigeonholed into choosing treatment options that promise only more pain.
The implementation of right-to-die laws nationwide is not a panacea for the enormity of our medical dilemmas. But the $50 billion bill for extensive end-of-life treatment that taxpayer dollars footed in 2009 was more than the amount spent on national education in that year. And it was also more than the budget of the Department of Homeland Security.
Maybe laws that allow terminal patients access to legally prescribed drugs to end their lives prematurely would only be utilized by a fraction of the qualifying population. But this sort of option ought to be restricted to those terminally ill patients mentally fit enough to make a such a definitive declaration about their final days.
And despite the potentially minimal financial impact of this change, it would be a step in the right direction. It would promise a more rational approach to end-of-life decisions and the spending associated with them. Plus, if these laws were coupled with more rational spending caps for Medicare, we would likely see a reduction in general medical spending that would go a long way toward addressing our national debt.
Ultimately, a morally based opposition to the implementation of death-with-dignity laws is devoid of a logical backing. It reeks of the thinly veiled religiosity that has come to define opposition to equally divisive medical topics like abortion and stem cell research. It ignores potential fiscal benefits and entirely discounts the notion of quality of life. And most importantly, it stalemates discussions of core issues regarding death by shouting down dissenting voices with blasphemous profanities.
And as each year passes and the baby boomer generation creeps closer and closer to old age, end-of-life issues will loom ever larger. These septuagenarians and octogenarians will soon be our grandparents, our parents, our uncles and aunts and our family friends, if they are not already. But despite the inherently emotional nature of death and dying, we can no longer cling to an outdated mode of addressing one of life’s few inevitabilities.
This foolishness will bankrupt this country and it will ensure that terminal patients spend untold millions of hours clutching to the most tenuous sense of life. In place of that irrationality we must construct end-of-life policies that allow patients to more fully determine their own lives. Death-with-dignity laws are central to these new constructions, as they will afford patients the option to end their lives on their own terms, without the expense — literal and figurative — of painful, superfluous procedures.
I am not advocating for death panels. I do not believe legal access to pharmaceuticals that will ensure death is appropriate in all situations. And I do not believe that any authority other than the patient involved should dictate end-of-life decisions. But for mentally fit, terminally ill patients, we should allow and honor medical decisions that will hasten death. We should at least have the option to die with dignity and the sense of security inherent to it. In death I should be able to exercise my agency just as I did during life.
Sean Blake ’17 can be reached at sean_blake@brown.edu.
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