Why is she being identified as a rape victim alone in headlines in the first place when it’s not the subject of the story but rather an explanatory fact about factors that led her to the point of requesting euthanasia. Lots and lots of people are rape victims, many of them have mental health problems before and/or after, some of them develop serious illnesses in life. What a pathetic click grab tactic… too bad nothing changes.
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I’ve got a real problem with this. My stepfather was put on “palliative care and no feeding tube”. I sat with him while he died. It wasn’t pretty. It took 3 days (he was a tough old bastard). To me this is an ugly legal fig leaf. “We can’t HELP you die peacefully, but we can LET you die horribly. You can have lots of morphine, but not enough to hurry the process along because that would be bad.”
If I ever get there, please, somebody shoot me up with way too much morphine and I’ll ride out on a cloud.
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Sure, Loki. The country is America. Physician-assisted suicide is only legal in this country in limited jurisdictions, and with very strict limitations including the diagnosis of a terminal illness. In all places in America where physicians are allowed to assist an individual to commit suicide, the individual must be over 18, possessing full capacity to make an independent decision, etc.
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My uncle’s father killed himself (with a gun, because America) over the winter because of this horribly twisted “logic” caused by the US medical community having to abide by fucked up drug laws and anti-choice zealots preventing sensible end-of-life laws.
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Oh, if it’s that simple, why don’t you go fix Alabama, Missouri, Ohio et. al.
And before you accuse me of false equivalence, it’s the same people fighting the same battle: it’s about the right to choose what we do with our bodies. Just like they’ve gone after birth control alongside abortion, they will (and do) go after palliative care and DNRs alongside euthanasia.
So this is not new, and false equivalences like yours hand the enemy ammunition to shoot us with.
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In which case a severely ill minor was allowed to starve herself to death. It might not be euthanasia but it is not how medical ethics operates in most countries.
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This is the case of a minor! Which should make all the difference in how she can access services and what care she receives.
It sounds as though your opinion is that she should have been force-fed (again).
I take it you have some expertise in the field of international medical ethics? (I don’t, I’m just a schmoe with my own opinions. I have as much knowledge about medical eithics in the USA as the next informed citizen. I can’t claim to know about “most countries”, but the diversity of comments in this thread seems to imply your statement might not be entirely accurate.)
Yes, I concede that my comment was not an accurate formal definition. I was focused on the consideration that the logical conclusion of the argument is force-feeding, which is (or can be, at any rate) torture, as a number of other commentators have pointed out.
Other than the point about force-feeding (often) being torture, it seems to me that the dichotomy you are drawing between cancer and mental illness continues the often-lamented problem of discounting mental illness as a “real” illness.
Let’s not make the mistake of thinking this was exclusive to right-wing media, though. I first saw the story in the Washington Post (who later updated the story with a mealy-mouthed “but not so fast actually it’s ‘unclear’” preface).
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My opinion is that this is an extremely complex case of medical ethics just like this. The fact that she is a minor is and should be central to what care she receives.
I worked in Patient Safety and thus have thought a bit more about these issues than the average schmoe. In the UK children have been forced to receive grueling treatment (e.g. cancer treatment) against the wishes of their parents by the courts–for illnesses which have similarly if not even less uncertain outcomes as anorexia nervosa.
Finally, by deciding not to force feed this young girl the clinicians have determined anorexia to be a terminal illness which can not be effectively treated. I.e. it has been determined to be as untreatable as final stages of cancer. Many if not most cancer patients are given grueling and pointless treatment (there is a huge industry of gruelling treatment) which destroys quality of life without significantly extending life.
So, it’s complicated. I wonder what the parents thought, if they were in agreement with the clinicians or just resigned and gave up the fight.
In the UK people die of anorexia not because they refuse treatment, but because they can’t access appropriate care.
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Would it be possible to consider that the dichotomy you have set up between being left to die and torturous force-feeding may be false?
I was wondering if someone would put forth that point. I don’t think anybody here has belittled mental illness, and I don’t doubt its reality. I do, however, doubt that it meets the standard given in laws like those we have in the US for “terminal illness.”
If the only way that mental illness is going to actually kill someone is if they commit suicide, then assisting them to commit suicide because they have a mental illness seems remarkably circular.
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Today I learned that it’s possible (under some circumstances) to get adequate nutrition solely intravenously! Thanks for that tidbit. The precise method of feeding doesn’t change the point I intended to make, however, which was that if a person doesn’t wish to submit to a treatment (whether it be “eating a bowl of rice”, “being fed through a tube up their nose” or “being fed through an intravenous catheter”), there is an argument to be made that forcing them to do so is wrong. (Also, and not for nothing, large-volume IV fluids are not exactly a walk in the park, though they’re not as invasive as a tube up the nose.)
By the way, I’m sensible of the point that @nojaboja makes that considerations about forcing a person to undergo a treatment can differ for children. It seems to me (and again, I confess to not being a professional medical ethicist) that a spectrum exists, with infants on one end (patently unable to make informed decisions, adults must do so on their behalf) and young adults on the other. The person in this case, a 17 year-old, was on the latter end of course.
It may be redundant for me to say so at this point in the conversation, but I think there is a world of difference between “keeping a person comfortable while they go through with their chosen course of action” and actually assisting them with doing so.
If you could, with a straight face, make the case that without palliative care the person would have said “oh damn, actually I’m hungry, pass me that bowl of rice” then I guess you could support “assisting”. But that doesn’t seem like a very believable argument given the case history.
Or in short, I don’t accept the narrative that the doctors in this case assisted the young woman to commit suicide.
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Sure as shit seemed that way to me. The more apt analogy is that suicide is stage iv for sufferers of mental illness. Upthread someone mentioned (was it you? I should look but I’m not gonna) access to preventative care as a barrier to better outcomes; I think that starts with how we discuss mental illness, the norm of which our original comment opitimizes in popular expression. Most people tacitly accept the Most Selfish Act theory unquestioned, which IMO is a heap of bullshit, and extremely harmful.
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In a tangentially related matter… internet “fuckery” can BB do anything about the quality of ads it shows?
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Ta.
That helps.
Pallative care is for when it’s clear people are not going to live, about making comfortable as death takes it’s natural course. It was a god send when it became clear that my father was not going to beat the cancer. it does not give people drugs so they can die immediately (which is really ever person’s right). It’s making the very hard decision to end care when it’s only prolonging what is in fact inevitable.
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Then that’s not proper pallative care. Letting my dad die, at home, with dignity was a far better choice than forcing him to go through chemo that was not helping, and only making feel terrible. There is no getting around death, and forcing people into care they don’t want is only making the end of their lives more miserable.
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Yup, which is why I started with the general media and then focused on the rw media outlets. Most mainstream media is prone to sensationalism as well, but they seem to do it for the dollars and not to push an agenda.
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Yes, this.
Like I said, I remember when it wasn’t really a thing and seeing a man who was days away from death being flat-out denied enough drugs just to numb his pain because “he might become addicted”. The thinking seemed to be that a miracle might occur. Any miracle that could have saved him would also have been able to fix something as piddly as addiction.
The fact that so many people think that they can make better medical decisions from the sidelines than a patient and their own doctor is enraging. Whether it’s abortion rights or right to die, it comes down to the same thing: people who want others to suffer.
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If we say that
then are we saying that people who attempt suicide are ipso facto non compos mentis?
If so, then isn’t it impossible ever to have informed consent to suicide?
Let me guess, Fox News is not one scrambling to issue corrections, or at least the back-end-of-the-horse that is their punditry. They’re ride this “how’s your Scandanavian socialism now? LITERAL DEATH PANELS” right into the gold-plated sunset.
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