Count the Cost of Denying Patients Assisted Suicide: Bioethicist

Bioethics, Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, Life, , , ,

For more than 20 years Family Council has opposed efforts to legalize assisted suicide in Arkansas.

Last year we helped defeat a proposal to let doctors prescribe lethal drugs to patients.

One of the points we have made time and again is that patients, doctors, and hospitals may feel financial pressure to opt for assisted suicide, if it is legalized.

Last year a Canadian man with ALS made headlines when he chose to take his own life under the country’s assisted suicide and euthanasia laws after the government chose not to provide him with 24-hour home healthcare services due to cost.

In parts of the U.S. where physician-assisted suicide is legal, insurance companies have refused to pay for patients’ medical care, but have offered to cover assisted-suicide drugs.

Proponents of assisted suicide generally dismiss these concerns.

However, last week a bioethicist and a European professor published an article in which they actually argued that assisted suicide makes sense economically.

Writing in the journal Clinical Ethics, bioethicist Dr. David Shaw and Professor Alec Morton make three points:

  • Assisted suicide lets patients avoid suffering
  • The resources that would be used helping them could be used to help other patients instead
  • Doctors may be able to harvest organs from patients who opt for assisted suicide

The authors even go so far as to write,

For example, a patient who is in great pain because of cancer with a life expectancy of around two years will continue to require pain medication and support from clinical staff and also carers for those two years. For each such patient, legalising assisted dying would avoid this waste of resources.

There is so much wrong with these arguments that it is difficult to know where to begin.

For starters, we know from experience in other states that assisted suicide doesn’t actually help patients avoid suffering.

In fact, most people who inquire about assisted suicide generally are not concerned about pain or suffering.

Many of them are lonely and feel like they are losing control over their lives because of their illness. They need counseling — not a prescription for lethal drugs.

Second, you cannot place a dollar value on human life — but that is exactly where this type of thinking leads.

Being pro-life means believing human life is sacred from conception until natural death.

Just like abortion, euthanasia and assisted-suicide are murder, and they violate the sanctity of human life.

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Scientists In Michigan Engage in Clone-and-Kill Human Research

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University scientists in Michigan reportedly have developed a new technique to rapidly create “embryoids” — living organisms that are very similar to ordinary human embryos — in a lab.

According to an article published in Nature, researchers created the “embryoids” from embryonic stem cells as well as adult stem cells. Scientists experimented on the embryoids for a few days, and then apparently destroyed them.

There are several problems with this research:

First, it used embryonic stem cells to create the embryoids.

Embryonic stem cells are harvested from healthy unborn babies during the embryonic stage of development. Scientists create or clone an unborn child and then harvest its embryonic stem cells soon afterward, killing the child in the process.

Embryonic stem cell research is highly unethical, which is why it is illegal in some states — including Arkansas — and why there has always been controversy over efforts to fund embryonic stem cell research with public tax dollars. The fact that researchers used embryonic stem cells to create some of their “embryoids” is a real problem.

Second, the “embryoids” researchers created in the lab arguably are human embryos who simply are missing a couple of parts.

Researchers noted that the embryoids were similar to human embryos, but they lacked a placenta and yolk sac that develops into the umbilical cord and gastrointestinal tract.

But the placenta and yolk sac are not what make human embryos living, sacred human beings. An umbilical cord does not make an unborn child a “person” any more than an arm or a lung does. Scientists apparently want to argue that an embryo isn’t really an embryo if it’s missing a part or two. That’s very troubling.

Third, these “embryo structures,” as one of the researchers called them, were created, experimented on, and then killed in the name of science.

Over and over again we’ve seen scientists clone-and-kill human embryos in labs across America and around the world. As we have said for 20 years, this type of research simply is unethical.

Unborn children — including human embryos — aren’t lab material. All scientific research must respect the sanctity and dignity of human life.

Read more about this story from NPR.

Read the research article here.

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