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California Faces a Time of Choosing

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In California, it is a time of choosing for individuals, families, and the medical sector. Will doctors prescribe poison to their terminally ill patients, if asked? Will hospitals allow patients to commit suicides on premises?

If asked, will people attend the suicides of their ill loved ones, thus validating their worst fears and becoming morally complicit by their own participation?

I have urged an across-the-board policy of total non-cooperation. Assisted suicide may be legal, but no one can (yet) be made to participate in it.

Now, a courageous hospital appears on the verge of declaring itself an assisted suicide free zone. From the L.A. Times story:

Medical leaders at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena voted behind closed doors this week for the facility’s hundreds of doctors and affiliated personnel to opt out of California’s assisted suicide law, which goes into effect June 9.

If the proposed amendment to the hospital’s medical rules is approved by the board of directors this month, Huntington will become one of the largest non-religious medical institutions statewide to turn its back on a law that Governor Jerry Brown called “a comfort” to anyone “dying in prolonged and excruciating pain.”

Did you catch the reporter’s bias? Data from Oregon, Washington, Netherlands, Belgium, etc., all show that people do not commit assisted suicide due to “prolonged and excruciating pain,” but out of existential fears about being a burden, losing dignity, etc.

These are crucial issues that demand a compassionate response from caregivers, focused on suicide prevention. Such a response is cruelly denied to most patients who ask for assisted suicide.

More to the point of total non-cooperation: Assisted suicide isn’t just about the patient who wants to die.

  • It is about our individual and collective response to their despair.
  • It is about the adverse impact on culture and our view of the importance of human life, reflected in the fall off the vertical moral cliff seen in Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland.
  • It is about the impact on other seriously ill patients, likewise struggling with existential terrors, who could be dragged down by the suicide taking place down the hall or across the street.
  • It is about whether we will surrender to the culture of death or peacefully resist with every ounce of our being.

The culture of death brooks no dissent. This L.A. Times article is intended to ratchet up the pressure on the hospital — because it is secular — to yield to the suicide agenda.

I just hope its board of directors will stay true to medicine’s Hippocratic calling and keep their nerve.

Cross-posted at The Corner.

Image: © 2016 GraphicStock.com.

Wesley J. Smith

Chair and Senior Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism
Wesley J. Smith is Chair and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia. Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement.

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