The hope is that your doctor always acts in your best interest. Think again.
Our increasingly godless culture, coupled with pressure to reduce medical costs, is creating classes of elderly and infirm people considered less worthy of life. This is increasingly true for patients with mental deficiencies.
In short, many physicians are ignoring our God-given human dignity and Personhood.
That point is raised in a recent book by Charles Camosy, a bioethicist and theologian at Fordham University. Entitled Losing our Dignity: How Secularized Medicine is Undermining Fundamental Human Equality, the book asserts that the lives of millions of people with dementia will be at risk.
The central thesis is that as medicine became secularized it rejected the idea that humans are worthy of respect and protection because we are created in the image of God. Instead, we are now valued only if we are rational, self-aware, autonomous, and productive.
Headed Down a Dangerous Path
Camosy argues that if we remain on the current path in the United States, we will start euthanizing people with later-stage dementia.
Currently, euthanasia is not legal in this country, but physician assisted suicide (PAS) is allowed in 10 states and Washington D.C. While PAS is banned by law in our state, Georgia Right to Life provides helpful information and resources to those who have been told that their loved one will no longer receive treatment.
It’s important to note the difference between assisted suicide and euthanasia. With assisted suicide, a physician prescribes a lethal pill that the patient takes himself. Euthanasia, on the other hand, involves a physician who directly administers a lethal injection, sometimes against the will of the patient.
That reality was demonstrated in the Netherlands, where euthanasia is legal. In 2019 a doctor was acquitted of criminal charges for euthanizing an elderly woman against her will.
A Forced Euthanasia
While she originally requested to be euthanized if her dementia worsened, she later changed her mind. However, her family insisted that her first request be honored and held her down in order to sedate her and administer a lethal injection.
Similar concerns about promoting death for the elderly and infirm was raised in a 2019 article in USA Today that proclaimed: “Doctors should heal patients, not kill them. Assisted suicide make us agents of death.”
Written by Lydia Dugdale, an internal medicine physician and medical ethicist at Columbia University, the article states: “It’s not hard to see how the availability of physician-assisted suicide will pressure and coerce the sick, the disabled and the elderly to end their lives when they become too inconvenient for their loved ones and too costly for society.”
Dr. Dugdale added “By normalizing the option of death for patients whose lives [incorrectly] prove burdensome, patients will feel guilty for not hastening their deaths—something I’ve witnessed in my own medical practice.”
Eliminating the less Worthy
In addition, she said: “If we’re tempted to think physician-assisted suicide is about choice—empowering us to die on our own terms—we should think again. The legalization of the practice has prompted a broad consideration of whose lives are worth maintaining.”
She noted that “Insurance companies, for example are increasingly willing to cover the cost of cheaper death—including drugs over more expensive life-saving treatments…”
Camosy observes that what many dementia patients in this country already experience a form of unofficial euthanasia. “Isolated from the rest of us and kept ‘docile’ with various drugs in what are essentially warehouses where they wait to die alone,” he writes.
The future looks even darker and more sinister. Two prominent bioethicists have proposed creating a time-delayed, subdermal implant that would automatically release a lethal drug at a predetermined time, or after some event has occurred.
Called an “advance directive implant” (ADI), such a device would add further fuel to the disgusting idea that dementia patients’ lives are not worth living.
All of this should not be. It’s outrageous. We’re not animals and should not be treated like one, to be put down if we can’t play fetch anymore.
Because we’re created in the image of God, human life has an inherently sacred attribute and dignity that must be protected and respected at all times. There is no dignity in taking your own life, or having someone else do it.
Georgia Right to Life has embraced that fundamental truth for 50 years. We will continue the fight to protect all innocent human life with your prayers and financial support. Please visit the GRTL website to give, and God bless you.
Sources: cruxnow.com; gotquestions.org; cbhd.org; bioedge.org; beingpatient.com; usatoday.com; nationalreview.com.
By Wayne DuBois
Georgia Right to Life
Media Relations Advisor