To: The Oregonian
7/28/98
Edited version published July 29,1998
Pain management specialist, Doctor Marshall D. Bedder, M.D., categorically rejects physician-assisted suicide as an acceptable means of escaping intractable pain and discomfort ("Choosing to live without pain," The Oregonian. 7/23/98). Further, Dr.Bedder is sanguine regarding legislation currently under consideration by Congress, which would overturn Oregon's twice-approved "Death With Dignity" law and put the DEA (the US Drug Enforcement Agency, a branch of US federal law enforcement) in charge of overseeing doctors' use of pain-control medications.
Dr. Bedder gives no reason for opposing physicial-assisted suicide and supporting DEA oversight of physicians other than his belief that, with proper medical care, physical pain can be eliminated or reduced to a tolerable level. His concern is exclusively with pain control. Additionally, note must be made of Dr. Bedder's vested interest in keeping terminally ill people alive a short while longer.
Expenses in the final few days and hours of prolonged and unrestrained medical interventions frequently amount to astronomical sums and quickly destroy an estate the dying person has spent a lifetime creating. This consideration brings up the issue of personal values: Doctor Bedder's statement does not address other personal reasons (disability, indignity, expense, etc.) for terminally ill persons choosing to die sooner rather than later.
More generally, the primary issue of an adult person's sovereignty over his or her own body has become obscured by a religion-based taboo against suicide. This is the same sovereignty which has been upheld by the US Supreme Court concerning a woman's right to choose to abortion, up to the point where another individual's rights supercede (at about 24 weeks into pregnancy). Legally transgressing this personal soveriegnty may have unintended and disastrous consequences.
An individual's whole life may be spent dedicated to values and goals which are totally ignored in the course of unwelcome intervention by policy-makers and doctors, seeking to briefly prolong the patient's life for possibly misguided or abstract or pecuniary reasons. This assumption of collective authority over the most private of actions is in stark contrast with most religious conservatives' emphasis on individual responsibility.
When it comes to juvenile violence, conservative commentators plead that it is individual choice or predisposition - and not the influence of Sylvester Stallone, et. al. - which brings students to shoot teachers and classmates. When the issue is tobacco-related illnesses and death, conservatives have sided with the tobacco industry, and denied corporate responsibility for statistically predictable injuries resulting from addiction and compulsive overconsumption. Such "self-poisoning" is held to be a private and personal matter.
Very slow corporate-assisted suicide (tobacco addiction) is OK; much quicker physician-assisted suicide, for those who are about to die anyway - and who request to die, is unacceptable.
It is common that such conceptual inconsistencies lead to confused public policies. For another example: the same depressed person who is judged incompetent, under Oregon State Law, to receive assistance in dying quickly, would, most likely, be judged fully competent for the purpose of being tried and sentenced for violent crimes (terminally ill or not). In capital cases, the very person who cannot legally obtain help to kill themselves may be judged as sane,and convicted, for taking the life of another person. The very same person who is judged legally incompetent to commit suicide will be judged mentally fit for execution under the public authority.
The inconsistency is obvious between political and social conservatives' traditional support for local government control (states' rights) and their eagerness to pass federal legislation which will overturn the Oregon law. The knight suspects there is a willingness to compromise principles given the opportunity to exploit the religious taboo against suicide.
_______The Knight's Assistant