After learning about her incurable disease, a young American woman decided to die by euthanasia and set the date of her death – November 1, 2014. Do we have the right to decide when to die?
When 29-year-old Brittany Maynard, who had just played her wedding, found out that she had a malignant brain tumor and she had only six months to live, she and her husband considered the situation and decided to move from San Francisco to Oregon. It is one of five states in the US where patients are given the option to die of their own free will. The attending physician gave her a pill that will allow her to die peacefully and without pain – in her sleep. Maynard would like to die on November 1 this year in her bed, next to her closest ones – her husband, mother, stepfather and best friend.
“Every cell in my body wants to live, I never even considered suicide,” Maynard said in an interview with People magazine. – I would really like my disease to be cured, but this is impossible, after the operation the tumor began to grow even faster. I consulted with many specialists, and they all told me that dying from grade 4 glioblastoma is very painful. I feel better at the thought that I have a choice – to save myself and loved ones from pain. It’s very hard for my husband and mother now, but they support me because they went to the hospital wards and they know what kind of future awaits me there.”
Brittany opened the site , where he collects signatures so that the opportunity to die without torment becomes available to everyone. According to doctors, many of those to whom they prescribe the “death pill” end up not resorting to it – the very fact that it can be taken at any moment calms and gives strength to fight.
Most of us have not seen death up close and have not gone through severe physical suffering – therefore, we do not know what we are talking about when we declare that “suffering must be endured, this is normal,” says the famous American surgeon, professor at Harvard Medical School Atul Gawande (Atul Gawande). Based on his experience as a doctor, he wrote the book “What it means to be mortal” *, in which he defends the right of everyone to die with dignity.
“It is enough to spend a little time with the terminally ill or dying of old age to understand that medicine, even the best, is powerless to help them, it only prolongs the suffering,” says Gawande. “The last precious weeks and months of our lives are given over to drugs and procedures that dull our brains and exhaust our bodies for the sake of a illusory hope of recovery. We spend the rest of our days in hospitals and nursing homes, among strangers, cut off from everything we hold dear in life. We could spend this time without suffering, enjoying the company of loved ones, and die peacefully in our bed.”
Read more:
- “What I want and what I love…”
Why prolong a painful life with all your might when you are locked in the body, as in a prison, and you cannot move, speak, breathe without the help of medicines and devices? In Italy, 45 out of 50 families choose to let a child with spinal muscular amyotrophy leave at their own time and do not connect a ventilator.
Lydia Moniava, manager of the children’s program at the Vera Hospice Assistance Fund, writes on her social network page that European and American doctors who come to help in the hospice always ask: “Would you like such a life for yourself? Not? Then why in Russia do they artificially prolong the life of these children, put them in intensive care, connect them to a ventilator? See how they suffer and how their families suffer, who have to 100% give up their own lives and deal only with medical care for the child.
Her answer expresses the position of many in our country: “The quality of life of seriously ill children is much higher than mine, if you think about the depth, meaning and what they give to the people around them,” says Lidia Moniava. – Still, the meaning of life is not only how much you can get from life – yes, children in a vegetative state can get very little for themselves – but how much you can give. The quality of life is not measured by some pragmatic concepts – can you walk or not, can you eat or not. The quality of life is when meaning is found in everything that happens. Some of our foster families do not want this kind of life for themselves and their children, and I think the hospice should support them. Some families see the point and want the child to be with them for as long as possible. The hospice should also support them, because “every person is a sacred story.”
* A. Gawande «Being Mortal» (Metropolitan Books, 2014).