Medical Aid in Dying: Smart, Compassionate Policy for New York
Corinne Carey
December 11, 2022
Corinne Carey is a Campaign Director for a New York organization called Compassion and Choices, who has been pushing for passage of Medical aid in dying legislation, since 2015. She spoke to this group on the subject some years back, and presented an update.
The legislation still has not passed; its latest iteration carried 72 legislative sponsors. But eleven other states, starting with Oregon, and including California and New Jersey, have enacted such policies. Republicans uniformly oppose it.
Carey quoted medical writer Atul Gawande, that life is meaningful because it’s a story, and in stories endings matter. People often idealize how theirs will end, a peaceful exit among loved ones. But given our medical-industrial complex, that’s not usually how it goes.
The legislation Carey advocates is aimed at giving people more options and control. The gist of it is to allow a mentally competent adult, diagnosed with less than 6 months to live, to receive life-ending medication for self-administration. There’s a list of 12 safeguards to prevent abuses. Carey noted that for all the “slippery slope” arguments against it, in fact, in all the years and in all the states where such programs have been in effect, there hasn’t been a single documented instance of abuse. (And in states with mature programs, fewer than 1% of those who die do so via this option.)
On the other hand, it does make dying at home a more realistic option; in fact, achieving this in almost 90% of cases. Whereas failing this option, people can be faced with the grislier one of “VSED” – voluntary stopping of eating and drinking. While others may resort to violence to end their lives – which doesn’t always work, often resulting in some pretty nasty situations.
Carey showed that public support for medical-aid-in-dying legislation, in all regions, tends to run at about two-thirds, even among religious people.
She spoke a lot about hospice and palliative care, which aims not at curing illnesses but, when that’s no longer possible, reducing suffering. She noted that “palliative sedation” puts the patient in a final coma – but it’s tricky to get the dose right.
Meantime, however, Christianity has a doctrine of “redemptive suffering” – an idea that suffering is actually a good thing (and hence shouldn’t be ameliorated). It supposedly compensates for sin, one’s own and that of others, and indeed somehow compensates for the suffering of Jesus on the cross, which he also took on to save humanity from sin. The word “sick” came up in discussion of these ideas.