By Burke J. Balch, J.D.
The very first issue of this newspaper in
November 1973 contained four stories about euthanasia, including a
full page on “The Mercy Killers.” Indeed, from the pro-life
movement’s inception (which of course preceded the 1973 Roe v.
Wade decision), we have been just as concerned with protecting
vulnerable people, especially older people and those with
disabilities, from euthanasia as we have with protecting unborn
children from abortion.
In the years immediately following Roe,
when the focus was on attempting to pass a constitutional “Human
Life” amendment, the drafters of NRLC’s proposal were careful to
ensure it would protect “all human beings irrespective of age,
health, function or condition of dependency,” precisely because of a
well-grounded fear that dehumanization of the unborn would spread to
exclude others, those whose “quality of life” was deemed
unacceptable, from the protected human community.
The 1980s saw high-profile cases of denial of
lifesaving medical treatment to children born with disabilities. The
two that garnered the most attention were the Bloomington, Indiana,
“Infant Doe” case—an infant with Down syndrome who was starved and
dehydrated to death—and the Long Island, New York, “Baby Jane Doe”
case—an infant with spina bifida who, despite initial denial of
treatment, survived.
After major efforts by the pro-life and
disability rights movements, Congress passed the Child Abuse
Amendments of 1984, which created a standard of care for infants
born with disabilities. Sadly, there is considerable evidence that
today this standard is not enforced and indeed largely ignored in
neonatal intensive care units throughout the nation.
In 1990 national attention was focused on active
euthanasia when Jack Kevorkian began publicly assisting suicides in
Michigan. Together, again with disability rights organizations, the
pro-life movement became heavily engaged in the debate over whether
the law should provide protection against assisting suicide.
National Right to Life played a key role in the 1997 enactment of
the federal Assisted Suicide Funding Restriction Act. In the same
year the United States Supreme Court, in the cases of Washington
v. Glucksberg and Vacco v. Quill, rejected claims that
assisting suicide is a federal constitutional right.
Apart from referenda legalizing assisting suicide
in Oregon in 1994 and in Washington state in 2008, efforts to do so
in every other state legislature or referendum that has considered
it have to date been defeated. With the exception of Montana, in
every state in which attempts have been made to do so by court
action, the highest-level court to consider the matter has rejected
them. Indeed, largely through the efforts of National Right to Life
state affiliates, 11 states have passed laws providing for civil
remedies, including injunctions, against assisting suicides.
The decade of the 1990s also saw National Right
to Life’s creation of the Will to Live, an advance directive
document that allows a person to direct that should he or she lose
the ability to make health care decisions, lifesaving medical
treatment, food, and fluids must not be denied—and to appoint a
trusted health care agent to speak for him or her in such
circumstances. The Will to Live and its accompanying wallet card,
available in an appropriate form for each U.S. jurisdiction through
http://www.nrlc.org/MedEthics/WilltoLiveProject.html are one of
the items most sought from NRLC by its members and the general
public alike.
From 1998 to 2005, the nation’s attention was
caught by the prolonged struggle over whether Terri Schiavo would be
starved and dehydrated to death, as advocated by her husband, or
provided food, fluids, and care, as advocated by her parents and
siblings. Her family’s efforts, supported by tens and even hundreds
of thousands, staved off repeated attempts to bring about her death,
culminating in passage of a federal law designed to allow civil
rights issues to be raised on her behalf in a federal court.
Tragically, the federal courts refused even to
stay state court starvation and dehydration orders pending a
hearing, and she died. Through the Terri Schiavo Life and Hope
Network, her family continues to fight for the lives of those
similarly situated, and their presentations at National Right to
Life Conventions are always among the most attended and treasured by
convention-goers.
Involuntary euthanasia involves either denial of
lifesaving medical treatment, food, or fluids against someone’s will
or direct killing of a person against that person’s will. NRLC has
been in the thick of the fight against involuntary euthanasia
whether imposed by government or by health care providers.
After Oregon sought to implement a plan that
would ration Medicaid based on the degree of a person’s disability,
pro-life efforts to fight it were topped by NRLC Vice President
Robert Powell’s success in personally persuading President George H.
W. Bush to consider whether it violated the Americans with
Disabilities Act; President Bush concluded it did. (Sadly, when Bill
Clinton became president, he approved the Oregon rationing plan.)
The 1993 proposal to enact the Clinton Health
Care Rationing Plan on a national basis led NRLC to create a
department devoted specifically to working against euthanasia—later,
after Powell’s death, named the Powell Center for Medical Ethics.
NRLC highlighted the rationing in the Clinton plan, which by many
accounts played a significant role in its 1994 defeat. We fought
just as hard against the rationing of the health care restructuring
that narrowly passed in 2010, the rationing aspects of which will go
into full effect in 2015–16.
Especially since the early 1990s, NRLC has had to
fight the increasing practice of health care providers, especially
hospital ethics committees, to deny health care and even food and
fluids against the will of patients on “quality of life” grounds,
sometimes denominated “futility.” Largely as the result of efforts
by NRLC and its state affiliates, 12 states now have laws that
protect patients against such involuntary denial of treatment, food,
and fluids.
The story of the struggle against euthanasia in
the last four decades certainly features significant defeats. Yet,
had the pro-life movement not been active in that struggle, there
can be little doubt that the current situation would be far, far
worse. Legalization of assisting suicide, which many astute
observers predicted would by the turn of the millennium be
widespread in the United States, and perhaps even be recognized as a
constitutional right, has been so far held to a handful of states.
The “quality of life” medicos have not had free reign, and now face
legal constraints in almost a quarter of the states.
In the area of government rationing of
life-preserving treatment, there is no gainsaying the tremendous
blow sustained by the 2010 enactment of the “Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act,” and the effect of the 2012 elections in
cementing it into place. Yet the defeat of the Clinton Health Care
Plan staved off major rationing for about two decades. Not only is
it true that, consequently, an uncountable number of lives that
would otherwise have been lost have been saved over that time, but
medical progress has been allowed to continue.
According to the American Cancer Society in a
2009 report, the number of cancer deaths steadily declined in the
United States over the previous 15 years, saving a possible 650,000
lives, and the cancer death rate fell by 19.2 percent for men and
11.4 percent for women. While future medical progress is likely to
slow to a crawl under the new health care law because of the severe
constraints it will impose on even non-governmental health care
spending, the advances in medicine over the two decades made
possible by the defeat of Clinton’s plan will not be wholly
reversed–so that these advances will continue in the future to save
lives that otherwise would have been lost, despite the new law.
And–most importantly–the only way we can be sure that the new
law’s limits will never be loosened or repealed is if we give up and
stop fighting for the right of the vulnerable, including those
already born, to live.
