The
results varied from country to country...
by Theodore Dalrymple from PJ Media
Not long ago the New England
Journal of Medicine ran an article on the vexed question of
physician-assisted suicide in the case of the terminally ill, and doctors were
asked to vote, for or against, online. The results of the poll have just been
published.
As the editors are at pains to point
out, such a poll has no scientific validity, since those who took the trouble
to vote were not a representative sample of anyone but themselves. This does
not mean, though, that the poll was altogether without interest, though certain
data would have made it even more interesting.
In all, the journal received 5,205
votes from doctors around the world. However, the editors noticed that there
were multiple votes in quick succession from several locations in Canada,
suggesting a concerted effort to influence the result. These – 1,137 of them –
were excluded from the report, leaving 4,068 votes deemed valid.
It would have been interesting to
know in which direction the discounted votes voted, but this information was
not given. Do those against or those in favor of physician-assisted suicide
have a more active lobby or pressure group in Canada? I am not sure I would
know which way to bet: one could almost hold a poll on the subject.
The fact that the lobby group
(if that is what it was) voted in quick succession suggests a degree of the
blindness of monomania, for surely anyone other than monomaniacs would have
realized it would be best to vote at intervals rather than in quick succession.
I was rather reminded of the few murderers whom I have known who killed for
life insurance money after the sum assured on the victim had been raised
dramatically. They could seldom wait more than two weeks before they killed the
victim and made their claim: a sequence of events that greatly assisted the
police in elucidating the crime.
There were 1,712 votes from 39 of
the United States and 2,356 votes from 74 other countries. Overall the votes
were similar in the U.S. and abroad: 67 percent of American doctors, and 65
percent of foreign ones, were against and 33 and 35 percent, respectively, were
for.
There were 11 countries, however, in
which a majority of voters were in favor (with Mexico in the lead), and 18 of
the 39 American states. Interestingly, Oregon and Washington were not among the
former, though they are the two states in which physician-assisted suicide is
actually legal. Unfortunately, the sample is too unrepresentative to draw any
conclusions from this, for example that doctors in those states who have seen
assisted suicide up close have turned against it. The voting might just as well
have been the result of die-hard, last-ditch opposition to what has already
been accepted.
The voters were allowed to record
briefly their reasons for their vote. The main argument for is that doctors
have a duty to relieve suffering as well as prolong life. A less good reason
given, indeed one that seems to me senseless, was that if physicians assist at
birth they ought also to assist at death. Those against used the familiar
argument from the slippery slope. We are all of us dying from the moment of
conception; why should the mortally ill alone be spared the pain of continued
existence? And if assisted suicide is a right, who has the corresponding
obligation to provide it?
In Britain, younger doctors are more
in favor of assisted suicide than older. Whether this represents a cultural
change or merely the effect of aging as the prospect of being shuffled of this
mortal coil by homicidally humane young doctors draws closer is not yet known.
Theodore Dalrymple, a
physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan
Institute. His new book is Second Opinion: A Doctor's Notes from the Inner City.
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