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to come to the protection of the life of Terri Schiavo who was not in the process of dying as food and hydration were withdrawn from her in order to assure her death.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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We did it! We killed the CLASS Act, a key component of ObamaCare

We did it!  We took down CLASS!

Today the White House officially pulled the plug on the CLASS Act, a key component of ObamaCare.

This is a huge development in the health care debate. 

CLASS -- a Great Society style nursing home care entitlement authored by liberal lion Ted Kennedy -- was enacted in 2010 as part of ObamaCare.

But CLASS was poorly designed and actuarially unsound, and represented a massive taxpayer bailout risk.

And the folks in President Obama's HHS knew it.

But they gagged their own internal experts in 2009 and 2010, to keep the risk from being known publicly.

Had Congress and the American people known about the bailout risk, ObamaCare would very likely not have become law.

Last month, a congressional investigation finally exposed the internal warnings, and the White House's stone wall began to crumble.

Even the socialized-medicine zealots in the Obama Administration could no longer deny the truth.

With the president's poll numbers in the tank, and his reelection in serious doubt, they decided to cut their losses. The new nursing home entitlement had to go.

Today, they put out the announcement. They will not proceed with implementing this turkey. CLASS is dead.

This is a sweet victory for the many Americans who fought long and hard to stop ObamaCare from passing -- and one tinged with bitter irony, because of CLASS's key role in the law's enactment.

The new entitlement had been added to ObamaCare as a budget gimmick. It had been purposely crafted to look like a revenue-generator during its first 5 years of operation, when the government would be collecting premiums from participants but not yet paying out benefits. This would make the federal books look better by some $70 billion during the period, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And this in turn enabled congressional Democrats and the President to mask ObamaCare's true costs. By appending CLASS to ObamaCare, they could crow that the controversial legislation "wouldn't cost taxpayers a dime."

Well, their own actuaries knew otherwise, but couldn't say so publicly. CLASS would have cost taxpayers trillions of dimes.

If not repealed, ObamaCare will cost us even more than that: trillions of dollar, and more important, our freedom to control our own health care.

Meanwhile, the President's egregious mishandling of the health care issue is already costing the nation terribly, with health plan premiums rising and some economists blaming the new law, which doesn't take full effect for another two years, for continuing economic uncertainty and poor job growth.

Folks, the fall of CLASS is just the start.

In jettisoning this one flawed piece, the president's advisors may think they've made the law easier to preserve. But instead, they've confirmed their own cynicism, dishonesty, and wrongheadedness, and thus given momentum to the movement to fully repeal the law -- and replace it with a truly patient-centered system.

Congress should hold immediate hearings on this fiasco. What did the White House know, and when did they know it?

Meanwhile, we should savor this victory -- it's a taste of more to come.

(For more information, read our report on the CLASS Act coverup.)

Dean Clancy is FreedomWorks' Legislative Counsel and VP Health Care Policy.