Bioethicists: ‘Terminally Sedate’ People Committing Suicide by Self-Starvation |
In a newly released paper in the prestigious journal Bioethics, three prominent bioethicists argue that when someone decides to commit suicide via self-starvation and dehydration — known in euthanasia movement parlance as “voluntary stop eating and drinking” (VSED) — doctors should be allowed to “terminally sedate” the person trying to die when necessary to prevent intractable suffering.
Patients who commit VSED are often not terminally ill. In fact, euthanasia organizations promote self-starvation to the elderly who are not dying and as a means of becoming eligible for assisted suicide where it is legal by making oneself “terminal” via lack of sustenance.
VSED must be distinguished from the common circumstance when actively dying people stop eating. That’s a natural process and often peaceful because the body cannot assimilate food as organs shut down. VSED, in contrast, deprives the body of sustenance it needs to remain alive toward the end of causing death, i.e., it is a suicide method.
Without palliation, many people attempting VSED would abandon the attempt. The bioethicists know this and claim that once the decision to commit suicide is made, doctors are duty-bound to medically ameliorate the suffering that inevitably results:
If a patient is adamant in their refusal of food and water, the same physician must respect the competent refusal by not force‐feeding the patient and should offer standard palliative care, as they would for any other dying patient. Medical support for patients undertaking VSED should be adequate and proportionate to their symptoms, as per any other form of palliative care. This is arguably not assisted suicide.
If a patient is adamant in their refusal of food and water, the same physician must respect the competent refusal by not force‐feeding........