The Death With Dignity website lists VSED under “Other Options to Hasten Your Death” and recommends it as a “choice” that is “commonly accepted in the medical community.” VSED is suicide brought about by intentionally dehydrating and starving oneself to death.
Suicide by DEHYDRATION
Jane Gross, a New York Times journalist, encouraged and helped her 87-year-old mother to commit suicide by VSED with the help of care givers at her nursing home. According to Ms. Gross, her mother “wasn’t dying of anything.” It took 13 days without food or water for her to die. Afterwards, Ms. Gross wrote a book about it, A Bittersweet Season. Her most chilling line is, “I was twitching with impatience. I wanted my mother to hurry up and die.” The elderly “volunteering” to die of thirst and starvation, and their children and care givers aiding them, is a sign of a very sick society.
Patients Rights Council, Voluntarily Stopping Eating & Drinking: Important Questions & Answers http://www.patientsrightscouncil.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/VSED_Questions.pdf
Valko, Nancy, “New York Times Article, Dr. Timothy Quill Promote Physician-Assisted Suicide by Starvation and Dehydration,” 10/24/2016. https://nancyvalko.com
If a time comes when it is impossible to heal or cure, we should not deliberately hasten death. We should do what we can to meet the physical, emotional, social and spiritual needs of those who are seriously ill. We should lovingly care for them until they die naturally.
Patients who want potentially effective treatment should not be denied it even when there is only a faint hope of curing or extending life. Extraordinarily aggressive or experimental treatments can be tried with the option of stopping them if they don’t produce the hoped for results.
A balanced view rejects imposed death while it accepts an ethically sound decision to stop medical interventions that are ineffective, harmful, overly zealous, or extremely burdensome to the patient. It’s just common sense.
