New Fiction Book Exploring Morality of Euthanasia
What is it Like to Be Euthanized?
Suffering
Euthanasia is a contentious subject in the United States. Working as an EMT, I immediately saw the need for substantial policy change to allow people in abject suffering cessation from their pain. This was made clear to me in five simple words spoken so frankly the desire to die was unmistakable.
My patient was dying. Not fast, but very slow. He had been to dozens of doctor appointments over the past months. I had sat with him for surgeon consultations, pain clinic visits, x-ray scans, and many more. During one of these appointments my patient looked at his wife and said, “I can’t do this anymore.” The room lost its air, and she ignored him by making small talk with me. She had heard this before.
How we treat the dying is a reflection of what we think about death. Is failing to end someone’s suffering as bad as causing it? Knowing that the most promising outcome for some people is their immediate death does something to you. It permeantly re-norms your knowledge of what level of suffering is possible in the world.
Does the consent requisite in euthanasia make the morally wrong action of murder permissable? Are you responsible for the suffering someone experiences if you don’t assist in their suicide? Do outcomes take on a different moral color if they came about by your actions, or you inactions?
These questions are what the Army medics who provide medical care in quarantine during a prion outbreak are tasked to answer. Prions are real, and nefarious. They are proteins that cause dementia-like symptoms. There is no cure once infected, and the proteins can remain on surfaces for decades, and cannot be destroyed by heat, cold, acids, bases, or any disinfectant.
The main character, Chris, is plagued with indifference and inaction due to thinking euthanasia is equivalent to murder. Chris must watch with indifference as dozens of patients under his care slip away into mental senescence, and die a painful, forgetful death.
There are real factions in American medicine, and society at large, that think euthanasia is murder. These people stand in the way of policy that allows someone wanting to die to be killed in hospitals. These people are in healthcare, and being morally at ease with the moral charge euthanasia is required if policy is to proceed. These people take euthanasia as strict liability murder, and once the policies eventually find themselves in the states, we could be in for trouble. If you are one of these people, then drastic steps indeed are in order if you think people are being murdered all across the country.
When a group of soldiers in the book decides to secretly euthanize patients, the characters must decide how to act in the face of this knowledge. Is it as morally bad to murder as it is to fail to prevent a murder? One character with hard-line views is willing to take drastic steps to prevent this.
The book is a fictitious approach to two questions:
- What is it like to be euthanized for your own good?
- What is it like to euthanize someone for their own good?
Crafting an ethic of euthanasia is drastically needed in the US, and I hope that more people can come to grips with the moral intricacies of this before the polices are inevitably enacted.
