American Nurses Association Should Not Support Assisted Suicide

The National Association of Pro-life Nurses (NAPN) has responded to ANA’s call for public comments on their proposed document “Active Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide.”

As an organization dedicated to the preservation of ethical standards in the nursing profession, NAPN finds the document an unnecessary change from the current position. While the document makes several good statements regarding respect for the patient, any accommodation to the legalization of assisted suicide/euthanasia has no place in the medical profession. Nurses are healers, not killers, and legalization of the practice will not make it ethical.

The document cites as one resource for their study the pro-euthanasia organization, Compassion in Choices. The use of organizations as resources which have as their primary focus the legalization of these practices does not lend to the credibility of the document. There are other sources for the same statistics that could have been cited.

NAPN notes that the current statement of the ANA position on assisted suicide and euthanasia does not require any revision. Sadly, even that document, which declined to endorse assisted suicide/euthanasia, was not sufficient for the ANA to come to the protection of the life of Terri Schiavo who was not in the process of dying as food and hydration were withdrawn from her in order to assure her death. In their official statement, the ANA sided with the controversial determination that Ms. Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state and as such, the proper decision was reached in the withdrawing of nutrition and hydration based on some unsubstantiated statements she supposedly made regarding the care she would have wanted under such circumstances. The stated position of the ANA does not translate into life-affirming actions on the part of the ANA. The absence of activity to protect the life of patients speaks volumes and it would be naïve to think that the new document would produce any different action on the part of the ANA.

The main objection of NAPN to the document is the lack of any real protection for the conscience rights of nurses. As an organization which has been involved in the defense of exercise of these rights, it is distressing to us that the professional organization which purports to represent nurses has been absent in the defense of these nurses in spite of any platitudes to the contrary. Yes, limits outlined in the document do exist, but it seems unlikely that the ANA will come to the defense of the nurse who declines to participate when it has not done so in the practice of abortion. More than once at the state level where conscience protections were being considered for legislation, the state affiliate of the ANA has testified, not on behalf of the nurses, but on behalf of those who would force them to violate their conscience. Where are the protections for those in the medical profession who would object to participating in the omission of care for Terri Schiavo? The ANA remained silent when President Obama rescinded the conscience protections which were put in place in the waning months of the Bush administration. Such actions lead one to question just who the ANA actually represents.

Lastly, it should be noted that the ANA position of support for the highly politicized Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act further clouds the stated position of the ANA. Support for an act which promotes wholesale practice of abortion and provides for a Patient Advisory Board which would limit treatment is counter to the stated position of the ANA. The ANA cannot have it both ways. You cannot make high minded statements to the public and then act in a manner contradictory to these statements and retain your credibility.

We pro-life nurses feel abandoned with regard to the protection of our conscience rights in the workplace. In spite of the position statement of ANA supporting a nurse’s right to be exempt from participating in procedures which transgress her moral principles, they have been absent in the defense of nurses such as Cathy Cenzon-DeCarlo in New York in her dispute with Mt. Sinai Hospital for forcing her to choose between her conscience and her job. They were in absentia in the defense of the twelve nurses in New Jersey who were told they must participate in abortion or lose their jobs. In spite of platitudes in their statement, it has not translated into action. Nurses deserve better representation.

LifeNews Note: Marianne Linane is the Executive Director of the National Association of Pro-life Nurses. She holds a Masters Degree in Bioethics from Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois.

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Shock Article: Bioethicists Suggest Killing Someone With ‘No Autonomy Left’ Is Not Morally Wrong

What has Glenn Beck so fired up that he said on his radio show “If this doesn’t wake your a** up this morning, then nothing will?” How about this quote from prominent bioethicists comparing killing a human being to pulling weeds from a garden.

Two bioethicists — one from Duke University, the other from the National Institute of Health — bring up the question “What makes killing wrong?” in the latest issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics. Using their definition of killing, the authors conclude if the person is “universally and irreversibly disabled” and has “no abilities to lose” then killing them to take organs for donation in order to save the lives of others should not be considered morally wrong.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong from Duke University (Photo: Duke University)

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, a professor of practical ethics from Duke, and Franklin Miller, a senior faculty member in the NIH Department of Bioethics, state in their abstract ”What makes an act of killing morally wrong is not that the act causes loss of life or consciousness but rather that the act causes loss of all remaining abilities.“ They argue that if no abilities remain then the ”dead donor rule,” which is the ethical practice that a person must be declared dead before removing vital organs, should apply to patients whose hearts have stopped and are being removed from a respirator.

This discussion has been ongoing for several years and continues with this article. BioEdge, a publication discussing bioethical news, brings a few segments from the subscription-only journal in which Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller publish their opinion. BioEdge reports that the authors are seeking to make a case for organ donation after cardiac death when a person is taken off of a respirator. Once off the respirator, the person’s organs would be immediately harvested, but even at this point, BioEdge states, Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller believe the person is not yet dead because there is the possibility that his or her heart could start beating again.

Miller has written on this topic before for the New England Journal of Medicine. Here’s some of what was written in his co-authored piece from 2008 “The Dead Donor Rule and Organ Transplantation:”

Over the past few years, our reliance on the dead donor rule has again been challenged, this time by the emergence of donation after cardiac death as a pathway for organ donation. Under protocols for this type of donation, patients who are not brain-dead but who are undergoing an orchestrated withdrawal of life support are monitored for the onset of cardiac arrest. In typical protocols, patients are pronounced dead 2 to 5 minutes after the onset of asystole (on the basis of cardiac criteria), and their organs are expeditiously removed for transplantation. Although everyone agrees that many patients could be resuscitated after an interval of 2 to 5 minutes, advocates of this approach to donation say that these patients can be regarded as dead because a decision has been made not to attempt resuscitation.

In the more recent Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller article, BioEdge reports the authors as stating that “these patients are not known to be dead at the time of organ procurement.”

Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller argue that the dead donor rule is already being violated in many cases and that recognizing this violation and stopping organ donation in these conditions would drastically reduce an already limited number of donor organs for those in need. They suggest sidestepping this issue by rethinking the “norm of killing.” BioEdge has more from the authors:

“[T]he dead donor rule is routinely violated in the contemporary practice of vital organ donation. Consistency with traditional medical ethics would entail that this kind of vital organ donation must cease immediately. This outcome would, however, be extremely harmful and unreasonable from an ethical point of view [because patients who could be saved will die]. Luckily, it is easily obviated by abandoning the norm against killing.”

[...]

“[I]f killing were wrong just because it is causing death or the loss of life, then the same principle would apply with the same strength to pulling weeds out of a garden. If it is not immoral to weed a garden, then life as such cannot really be sacred, and killing as such cannot be morally wrong.”

BioEdge clarifies that the authors seeks to better define just what is considered killing. It adds that the authors suggest killing someone with “no autonomy left” cannot be considered “unfair” or disrespectful because it “if it does her no harm.”

Franklin Miller of the National Institute of Health. (Photo: NIH Department of Bioethics)

While Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller make this argument, BioEdge reports in a separate article that several doctors have called for a moratorium on donated organs in the event of cardiac death until the issue is resolved from an ethical standpoint. The doctors state this opinion in the journal Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine.

In the abstract, these doctors calling for a moratorium write:

Many believe that the ethical problems of donation after cardiocirculatory death (DCD) have been “worked out” and that it is unclear why DCD should be resisted. In this paper we will argue that DCD donors may not yet be dead, and therefore that organ donation during DCD may violate the dead donor rule.

[...]

Moreover, some arguments in favor of DCD, while likely true, are “straw-man arguments,” such as the great benefit of organ donation. The truth is that honesty and trustworthiness require that we face these problems instead of avoiding them. We believe that DCD is not ethically allowable because it abandons the dead donor rule, has unavoidable conflicts of interests, and implements premortem interventions which can hasten death. These important points have not been, but need to be fully disclosed to the public and incorporated into fully informed consent. These are tall orders, and require open public debate.

The issue, however, isn’t an isolated incident. The Blaze has recently published articles about a disabled man in the U.K. who is seeking the “right” to die and a 3-year-old whose parents were told she couldn’t have kidney transplant because she was “mentally retarded.” And last year, we posted the disturbing video of a British advice columnist who said if a child were disabled a loving mother would “put a pillow over its face” to smother it. Watch that clip:

Related:

Eugenics in Action