By Julie Grimstad
Physician-assisted suicide occurs when a physician provides the means to enable a patient to kill himself or herself.
The American Medical Association and the Supreme Court of the United States both acknowledge that PAS conflicts with the physician’s role as healer.
The AMA Code of Medical Ethics, Opinion 5.7, declares that “permitting physicians to engage in assisted suicide would ultimately cause more harm than good.” And “Physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.”
In 1997 (Vacco v. Quill), SCOTUS unanimously (9-0) upheld New York’s prohibition of assisted suicide. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, delivering the court’s opinion, wrote that the state’s “valid and important public interests” included “prohibiting intentional killing and preserving life; preventing suicide; maintaining physicians’ role as their patients’ healers; protecting vulnerable people from indifference, prejudice, and psychological and financial pressure to end their lives.”
A Critical Conflict of Interests
There are numerous evils inherent in PAS. HALO addresses them in our booklet Assisted Suicide: You Can Live Without It. However, in my estimation, the most harmful aspect of laws permitting PAS is that they turn physicians into legal facilitators of the ultimate self-harm, suicide. This creates a critical conflict of interest. A conflict of interest occurs when serving one interest involves working against another interest. A physician’s fundamental responsibility is to protect and preserve patients’ lives – and that includes suicide prevention.
Compassion & Choices (C&C) forbids use of the word “suicide” to describe laws with names like “Medical Aid in Dying” and “End of Life Options.” (C&C is the leading organization lobbying for PAS.) C&C insists that “Medical Aid in Dying” is not suicide [Medical Aid in Dying – Compassion & Choices]. Why? Because C&C is selling suicide, but the word suicide is so unpleasant, so repulsive to our senses, that it must be dressed up so people will buy it. As the saying goes, putting lipstick on a pig does not change the fact that it is a pig.
According to the AMA and SCOTUS, physician-assisted suicide is both harmful and incompatible with the physician’s role as healer. The question we must ask doctors who assist suicides is, “How can you call yourselves physicians?”
This article has been reprinted with permission. To learn more about how HALO can help you or a loved one, visit halovoice.org.