Palliative Care and Suffering

¶ … person has the right to live their lives with dignity and freedom, a person also has the right to die with the same dignity and freedom. A person who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, for which there is no cure and which causes certain pain, should not be forced to suffer. Likewise, a person should be allowed to choose whether or not to keep their body on life support indefinitely, even if they are in a persistent vegetative state from which no meaningful recovery.

The collective issues known loosely as "right to die" comprise various types of physician-assisted suicide, in which a medical doctor can help a terminally ill patient to end their suffering. Right to die legislation, like that recently passed in the state of California, helps not only the patients but also their families ensure all Americans have access to the quality of life they deserve. Promoting similar right to die legislation reflects the fundamental constitutional values of the United States, including due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (Waimberg).

Unfortunately, right to die issues also seem to conflict with another fundamental American value, that the state does have an overarching duty to protect and preserve human life. The Supreme Court had consistently argued that the right to die conflicts with the state's obligation to preserve life ("Right to Die;" Waimberg). Other arguments against right to die legislation point to fears that the policy might be abused in some way, such as by overly zealous doctors or nurses.

The opposite is more likely to happen, though, for in a profit-driven healthcare system, doctors and healthcare administrators have a vested interest in preserving, not ending lives. Parker claims that the medical field is built on a fundamental ethic of healing, and that ending life is contrary to the purpose of the profession. Yet the extension of life at all costs does not seem like an appropriate application of modern medicine, which should devote itself toward the improvement of human life.

Extending life does not enhance life's quality -- improving the way people feel, eliminating the root causes of disease. Dying is not, as some would suggest, the worst-case scenario. The essence of right to die legislation is the elevation of quality of life over quantity. Americans deserve the ability to choose whether or not they want to terminate their suffering. Right to die does not provide physicians or anyone else with the ability to administer deadly drugs arbitrarily.

On the other hand, right to die legislation is finely honed and drafted in order to ensure that only those patients who have been properly diagnosed and counseled would have access to the service. One way to get around the ethical and legal conundrums that plague right to die issues would be to set aside areas of specialization for both nurses and physicians working in palliative care.

Healthcare professionals who are trained to assess a patient's medical history, current state of mind, and beliefs about life and death might be able to help the patient and the family make the difficult decision of whether or not to die with dignity or wait out the suffering until some miracle might happen. Right to die issues are often confounded with suicide, but the right to die is different from the right to kill oneself out of depression or despair.

As Brown points out, individuals suffering from a terminal illness want to live, not to die. They have gone through countless rounds of chemotherapy or radiation. Their medical bills beyond what they or their families can afford, these individuals finally reach a point where their lives are spent in a hospital bed on a continual morphine drip. Palliative care is already an option for.