October 11, 2010

Please send me your comments!

By Wesley J. Smith

Editor's note. This first appeared at www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/2010/10/11/michael-caine-euthanasia-memory-actually-tells-hard-truths-against-prescribed-death/

Back in 1955, Michael Caine the actor says, he asked a doctor to kill his dying father. That may or may not have happened. And somehow, this 55 year-old event is supposed to promote voluntary euthanasia? From the story [www.scotsman.com/news/Michael-Caine-I-asked-doctor.6573008.jp] :

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R Michael Caine has revealed how he asked a doctor to help his terminally ill father to die. Maurice Micklewhite, a Billingsgate fish market porter, died in hospital at the age of 56 in 1955 after suffering from liver cancer. In a radio interview to be broadcast on Classic FM this evening Sir Michael says: "My father had cancer of the liver and I was in such anguish over the pain he was in, that I said to this doctor, I said 'Isn't there anything else you could (do], just give him an overdose and end this', because I wanted him to go and he said 'Oh no, no, no, we couldn't do that.'

"As I was leaving, he said 'Come back at midnight'. I came back at midnight and my father died at five past 12. So he'd done it." Sir Michael said his father had been given just three to four days to live when he asked the doctor to perform the mercy killing…Asked if he agreed with voluntary euthanasia, Sir Michael, 77, said: "Oh I think so, yeah. I think if you're in a state to where life is no longer bearable, if you want to go. I'm not saying that anyone else should make the decision, but I made the request, but my father was semi-conscious."

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I'm not saying others should make the choice, but I made the choice? I still don't understand why we care so much about what actors say regarding public policy issues.

But that point aside, this story reveals what happens when doctor administered death is deemed an acceptable answer to human suffering. Here are some thoughts:

• The event occurred long before the modern hospice movement transformed end of life care. Today, nobody should be allowed to die writhing in bed from metastatic cancer. Hence, assuming proper care, there would be no reason for an anguished son to beg a doctor to end it all.

• This was not a case of voluntary euthanasia. There is no indication that Caine's father wanted to be killed.

• If the father was killed, he was put out of Caine's misery.

• Euthanasia/assisted suicide isn't about ending the lives of people who have a day or so left to live. That is just the sales puffery.

• The reality of euthanasia/assisted suicide is quite to the contrary. In the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland, many people receive prescribed death who are not terminally ill, and indeed, the person terminated might not even be sick. This is also true here in the USA. For example most of Kevorkian's assisted suicides were not terminally ill and five were found not to even be sick at their autopsies. Ditto the traveling suicide clinics run by Final Exit Network. Ditto, Philip Nitschke's advocacy and some deaths in which he was involved in Australia (e.g., Nancy Crick). Even in Oregon, lethal prescriptions are often written for patients based on the patients' fears of being a burden, losing dignity, etc., in other words existential issues–that are important to address, but which have nothing to do with dying in unrelieved agony.

Of course, euthanasia promoters welcomed Caine's comment:

Last night a spokeswoman for Dignity in Dying, a charity campaigning for the legalisation of assisted suicide and assisted dying, welcomed Sir Michael's confession and called for new measures to allow doctors to help terminally patients die, if it is they so wish. "It is unimaginably difficult to watch a loved one suffer against their wishes at the end of their life."

The real lesson of this incident clearly escapes the ideologues of doctor-administered death. But the rest of us should need to understand. And learn.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three