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Death with dignity: end-of-life counseling helps
Q: Does end-of-life care prolong life or does it prolong suffering? Should it be a part of health-care reform?
End-of-life counseling is a way for seniors to keep some of their dignity, because it can help them and their families make some purposeful choices about this important time of life--a time of life that comes to all of us.
Human dignity, what Christians call "the image of God," means that people have the capacity to act with purpose, and not just be subject to somebody else's decisions for them. This is a way human beings are in the image of their creator--people create too. They act on the world--they're not just subject to instinct or someone else's will.
Dying often includes many assaults on your dignity as a human being. Dying is a process of losing control, especially over your body. There are a lot of indignities in dying. But one indignity you do not have to suffer is losing compete control over what happens to you--medical counseling is one way to help the elderly and their families really understand what different health care choices would mean. A provision that would allow Medicare to pay for this kind of counseling is a way to respect human dignity at the end of life.
Religious conservatives will argue that human dignity is not a matter of human agency--it is, in their view, just given by God and it never alters. While this can sound like a faithful point of view, it does not reflect biblical perspectives that we need to treat each other justly and fairly because not to do so dishonors the Creator--and it also does spiritual as well as bodily harm to human beings. As Psalm 35 so beautifully states, when someone does evil to me, they "leave my soul forlorn."
I agree that we need to treat human beings with dignity even when they have lost all capacity to make decisions for themselves--but that does not mean simply keeping people on life support forever, or not fully treating intractable pain. You respect human dignity when you recognize that death is a natural part of life. Artificially prolonged "life" does not really respect the human being whose body is being treated like a technologically animated corpse. In fact, zombie movies are a reflection of human horror at being an animated body with no human will left intact.
Today, health care for Americans is in many ways out of control. We could say that the health care system in this country itself is an assault on human dignity.
The current health care system assaults human dignity in several ways. First of all, health care for profit is essentially a violation of human dignity. Here's why: you cannot in good conscience make a profit every time you deny health care to someone. If the way I make more money is to keep you from being able to make the best choice about how to care for your own health, or the health of your children, I am violating the very thing that makes you a human being created in the image of God. I take away your ability to act purposefully. A for-profit motive in health care has an inherent ethical contradiction. There are some things that cannot be left to the profit motive alone--and health care is one of them.
The current health care system also assaults human dignity by not treating everyone equally. In a faith perspective, all people are equal in the sight of God. If some people are kept from being able to make good choices about the care of their own bodies, then that violates their human dignity in the most fundamental way.
We can only consider end-of-life counseling as part of a whole commitment to treat people as having infinite worth and inherent human dignity. In that context, it makes perfect sense for health care reform to include provisions that make it possible for people to keep their ability to act even at the end-of-life by making decisions that are informed by medical opinion.
End-of-life counseling respects human dignity. It is a critical part of reforming what is now so broken about health care.
By
Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite
|
November 3, 2009; 10:04 AM ET
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Posted by: rstaylor | November 4, 2009 5:19 PM
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Yes, Prof. thistlethwaite!
Particularly with this:
"Artificially prolonged "life" does not really respect the human being whose body is being treated like a technologically animated corpse. "
Why can't some people *see* that?
Posted by: Paganplace | November 3, 2009 6:40 PM
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"Human dignity, what Christians call "the image of God," means that people have the capacity to act with purpose, and not just be subject to somebody else's decisions for them. This is a way human beings are in the image of their creator--people create too. They act on the world--they're not just subject to instinct or someone else's will."
Don't you mean that human dignity is what you call the image of God? I was under the impression that Christians had called it many things.