So we’ve all heard of the “religious fanatics” or quasi-Taliban fighting to keep Terri Schiavo from a slow death by dehydration, ordered with nothing more than hearsay. (What could my views be?) But Reason’s Jesse Walker, seemingly spurning the line of argument favored by his colleagues, warns of a more likely slippery slope from the Schiavo case: the expansive power of doctors against families and spouses who want to keep severely injured or incapacitated family members alive. He approvingly cites a conservative Christian writer who “has best expressed why some of us non-conservative non-Christians can’t be so blase about pulling Schiavo’s feeding tube” – it’s worth reading in full:
Some families and patients did not “get with the program” and insisted that medical treatment be continued for themselves or their loved ones despite a “hopeless” prognosis and the recommendations of doctors and/or ethicists to stop treatment. Many doctors and ethicists were appalled that their expertise would be challenged and they theorized that such families or patients were unrealistic, “in denial” about the prognosis or were mired in dysfunctional family relationships. (In contrast, families who agree to withdraw treatment are almost always referred to as “loving” and their motives are spared such scrutiny.)
At a 1994 pediatric ethics conference I attended, one participant was even applauded when he suggested that parents who refused to withdraw treatment from their “vegetative” children were being “cruel” and even “abusive” by not “allowing” their children to die. In some cases, doctors and ethicists have even gone to court to force withdrawal of treatment over a family’s objections. These ethicists and doctors were stunned when judges were often reluctant to overrule the families. …
In the July-August 2000 issue of the Catholic Health Association’s magazine Health Progress3, Catherine M. Mikus and Reverend Peter Clark — a lawyer and an ethicist — argue that it is “time for a formalized medical futility policy” in Catholic hospitals. …
Mikus and Clark make it clear that they are not talking about treatments that are “harmful, ineffective, or impossible”, the traditional concept of medical futility that, of course, is not ethically obligatory. For example, no doctor would honor a family’s request for a kidney transplant for a person who is imminently dying. Instead, the authors argue for a new definition of futility to overrule patients and/or families on a case-by-case basis based on the doctor’s and/or ethicist’s determination of the “patient’s best interest”. Ironically, the “right to die” movement was founded on the premise that patients and/or families are the best judges of when it is time to die. Now, however, we are being told that doctors and/or ethicists are really the best judges of when we should die.
Sadly, Walker’s colleague Julian Sanchez feels the need to go after one of the foremost writers on the spread of “futile care” theory in America – my former colleague Wesley J. Smith – for having the temerity to suggest that humans are more than their brains in having rights. Think of how many of our politicians would be doomed under Sanchez’s reasoning…
I’m a tech journalist who’s making a TV show about a college newspaper.