|
ROBERT POWELL CENTER FOR MEDICAL ETHICS
512 10th Street NW Washington, DC 20004
(202) 626-8815 (voice) (202) 628-2784 (fax)
STATEMENT BY BURKE J. BALCH, J.D.
DIRECTOR, ROBERT POWELL CENTER FOR MEDICAL ETHICS
NATIONAL RIGHT TO LIFE COMMITTEE
Since its inception, the pro-life movement has been as
concerned about protecting vulnerable people with disabilities and older
people from euthanasia as about protecting unborn children from abortion.
You have heard from Dorothy Timbs of our center about the battle over
assisting suicide. I will briefly cover two other aspects that will be
important issues in 2005.
First, there is the Terry Schindler-Schiavo case, in which a young woman
with brain damage in Florida is threatened with death by starvation and
dehydration. Our Florida affiliate will be promoting protective legislation
in Florida based on the premise that casual oral comments that do not rise
to the level of informed consent should not overcome a presumption for basic
care, including food and fluids.
Second, an important part of our concern with euthanasia is the protection
of the American people from government-imposed rationing. We successfully
fought the premium price controls of the Clinton Health Plan in 1993-94, and
for the right of older Americans to add their own money to the government
Medicare contribution in order to get unrationed health care in the period
1995 through 2003. Now we are concerned that there is momentum for
legislation that would effectively impose price controls on prescription
drugs in Medicare. We are gravely concerned about the impact of such a
course on the ability to research and develop life-saving new drugs.
Moreover, if the ability to develop new drugs for Alzheimer’s disease and
other ailments that particularly impact older people is drastically limited,
the economic and social strains associated with the impending retirement of
the baby boom generation retirement may in the not-too-distant future make
the widespread imposition of active euthanasia on senior citizens with
disabilities very hard to resist.
We will be working, therefore, to educate pro-life Members of Congress, and
the public generally, about the rationing danger inherit in schemes to
impose limits on the price of prescription drugs.
|
