A doctor of The Scrapbook’s acquaintance was alarmed when he heard that the American College of Physicians was revisiting its official policy on physician-assisted suicide. Alarmed, because the ACP has traditionally been a staunch opponent of having doctors prescribe death. Would the organization succumb to political pressure and try to find a way to accommodate those states that have been legalizing Kevorkianism?
His fears proved to be unfounded. Last week the ACP issued an unambiguous position paper on “Ethics and the Legalization of Physician-Assisted Suicide.” The authors allowed they are attentive to those “who speak of the desire to control when and how life will end,” but remain firmly convinced by “the ethical arguments against legalizing physician-assisted suicide.”
The American College of Physicians position paper concludes, “Society’s goal should be to make dying less, not more, medical”:
Doctors should be grateful for the ACP’s unfashionable adherence to basic medical ethics and its resistance to a legal trend that may prove to handcuff physicians who don’t want to be in the death business. Once physician-assisted suicide is widely legalized, those advocates who had pushed for legalization will turn their efforts to getting government to force any and every doctor to participate in suicides as a basic sort of care.
If doctors want to have a choice about whether to have a hand in killing patients who request death, they will need all the support they can get from morally serious organizations such as the ACP.
