Hit the Road, Jack

Okay, maybe that was just a wee bit disrespectful to the dead, but I couldn't resist.
As most probably know, Jack Kevorkian died today.  My first reaction was, let's be honest here, not exactly Christian. I was glad to see him no longer polluting the planet with his evil ideas.

I've already had a few folks on facebook tell me that he performs a valuable service, they want someone like him around for them, etc.  Here's the thing: I think this is a relatively new issue because generations ago, people did not linger like they did today. If you were sick enough to be suffering that badly, you were also sick enough to be dying without any help at all in very short order. Once again, though, modern medicine is a double edged sword. The very things that extend our lives often work a little too well.  There is such a thing as too much intervention.

I've worked in a hospital for a very brief time in my life when I thought that I was going to be a nurse (another story entirely). I have seen patients that yes, needed to stop being kept alive by medical science.  I have heard patients such as those being used as an argument for assisted suicide.

Here's what I don't get: why do people insist on blurring the line between knowing when to let go and taking an active role in killing somebody? I'm not going to go down the "playing God" argument against euthanasia because frankly, we play God every single day by that same line of reasoning. Nonetheless, there is something that makes me very, very uncomfortable about a terminally ill person taking a fistful of pills in the same manner that one would take a dog to the vet to be put down. Can I totally narrow it down to a complete line of reasoning? Not entirely. I just think it is a very dangerous place to go. How, exactly do you define "terminally ill"? How many people also want to make it quick because of subtle pressure from the family? There is an awful lot of room for a slippery slope once you get into taking active steps to end somebody's life.

The truth is, I think that if we were honest about just how much an awful lot of doctors will do just about anything to prolong a patients life for just a few more miserable months, then a lot of this would cease to be an issue.  There is a world of difference between acknowledging the cruelty of extending an eighty year old person's life with treatment after painful treatment and becoming comfortable with mixing that same person up a drug cocktail especially for the purpose of killing them.

Yeah, I know about the fact that a lot of times a dose of pain medication strong enough to knock out the pain in a terminally ill patient is also strong enough to kill that same patient. So be it. I'm talking about the intent here. If the goal is to make the patient comfortable and they die in the process, I think that is a very different matter from, again, mixing up that cocktail for the specific purpose of ending the person's life. Motive, people, motive.

It is, again, a very bad jump of logic to go from the fact that the above is a fairly regular occurance to the assumption that deliberately killing somebody is OK.

This stuff NEEDS to be talked about. People should not be afraid to discuss the specifics of the end of life and the ethics involved. If they do not, anything other than pulling out all the stops to keep a patient alive will get lumped into the same category for political purposes. Pro-life people are afraid to talk about some of it for fear of appearing to endorse euthanasia. And the pro-suicide camp finds blurring the lines to be very helpful to the cause of advancing their objectives.