EUTHANASIA AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR HEALTH CARE RATIONING?(Brief Article)

Considerable commentary has followed in the wake of the determination by Attorney General John Ashcroft that federally controlled drugs may not be used to assist suicide. Not yet in effect while under challenge in the courts, the determination would have its greatest impact in Oregon, the only state whose law currently authorizes physician-assisted suicide.

In an otherwise urbane, "on the one hand, on the other hand"-style article by George Mason University Law School Professor Nelson Lund criticizing Ashcroft,1 one chilling paragraph stands out:

"[E]ven a skeptic like me has to admit the very real possibility that Oregon's approach is not the worst imaginable," Lund wrote in the February edition of Commentary magazine. "If ... the political and economic pressures for health-care rationing become significantly more intense, we may see a much more widespread denial of medical care to very feeble patients, including the withholding of food and water."

Having set the reader up, Lund then adds, "If the alternative to a miserable death by dehydration turns out to be physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia, Oregon's approach may begin to look a lot less bad than it does today."

Lund's justification of assisted suicide is all the more jarring in the context of the rest of his article, which raises many important warning flags about assisting suicide. For instance, he deplores the fact that, "Whether it happens directly through law and regulation, or informally, very sick patients who are elderly or whose prospects for recovery are thought to be small are going to be prime targets for `hastened death.' ... Once physician-assisted suicide is legalized, there will be strong temptations to pressure such patients to accelerate the inevitable ... especially effective with those who are clinically depressed."

Lund's scary prediction of pressure for assisted suicide as an "alternative" to starving and dehydrating people to death or as a "cost containment" measure is already well on its way to realization.

The most recent official annual report on Oregon's unique-in-the-nation law that has legalized physician-assisted suicide there found that 63% of those who killed themselves said they were motivated at least in part by fear of being a "burden."