Month: September 2017

Response of the National Association of Pro-life Nurses to the recent policy Statement of the American Nurses Association on voluntary holding of Food and Hydration

nancyvalko assisted suicide, euthanasia, food and water

I am a proud member of the National Association of Pro-Life Nurses (NAPN) myself. There is also a Facebook page for NAPN. Please share this, especially if you know a nurse or someone who is thinking about becoming one.

September 28, 2017

NAPN Response

The National Association of Pro-life Nurses (NAPN) is deeply saddened to learn of the recent position statement of the American Nurses Association (ANA) regarding the withholding of food and hydration as a means of hastening death.

Our organization had hoped that the announcement of the study of the issue would result in a better decision, but based on the ANA revised code of ethics of 2015, it does not come as a surprise. The ANA continues to show its complicity in promoting the culture of death.

The new position claims that “people with decision making capacity have the right to stop eating and drinking as a means of hastening death.” (Termed VSED for “Voluntary Stopping of Eating and Drinking.)

Unfortunately, for us as pro-life nurses, that means that the ANA will expect that nurses will comply with this decision and “honor” this decision, making us complicit with this form of suicide. As with other positions, the ANA will not come to the defense of any nurse holding a conscience objection to this policy. The ANA has effectively given up its previous position, weak as it was, of opposing assisted suicide.

The entire list of recommendations regarding food and water reads:

 “ANA Recommends that:

  • Nurses recognize those situations when nutrition and hydration can no longer benefit a patient, and adhere to clinical standards that include providing nutrition and hydration only to patients for whom it is indicated.
  • Patients with decision-making capacity—or their surrogates, who are relying on the patients’ preference or have knowledge of the person’s values and beliefs—will be supported in decision-making about accepting or refusing clinically appropriate nutrition and hydration at the end of life.
  • Nurses will have adequate and accurate information to understand patients’ cultural, ethnic, and religious beliefs and values regarding nutrition and hydration at the end of life. Patients’ views and beliefs should be respected.
  • Nurses will support patients and surrogates in the decision-making process by providing accurate, precise and understandable information about risks, benefits and alternatives.
  • Decisions about accepting or forgoing nutrition and hydration will be honored, including those decisions about artificially delivered nutrition as well as VSED.
  • People with decision-making capacity have the right to stop eating and drinking as a means of hastening death.” (All emphasis added)

The ANA statement goes on to admit that “There is some consensus (though not universal agreement) that VSED can be an ethical and legal decision”, but in regard to conscience rights, the document only states that “Nurses who have an informed moral objection to either the initiation or withdrawal of nutrition or hydration should communicate their objections whenever possible, to provide safe alternative nursing care for patients and avoid concerns of patient abandonment.” (Emphasis added)

Communication of the nurse’s objection to compliance “whenever possible” leaves the pro-life nurse adherent to the patient’s wishes if there is no other nurse to assume the task of the Grim Reaper. In cases where this is impossible, charges of “abandonment” can be filed resulting in loss of employment and or license and even to lawsuits.

The statement that “providing nutrition and hydration only to patients for whom it is indicated” is problematic in view of the removal of feeding tubes from the severely brain-injured like those said to be in the so-called “persistent vegetative state” and not dying could be starved to death with impunity. (Emphasis added)

The ANA claims to be the “voice of nursing” and “the nation’s only full-serviced professional organization that represents the interests of the nation’s 3.6 million registered nurses.” Yet, in reality, when the ANA last released its membership numbers in 2011, actual membership was less than 7% of registered nurses in this country.

The 2015 Annual Report does cite a 9% increase in membership, but no figures are available.  They certainly do not speak for the numbers of us who do not share their disregard for the lives of the vulnerable.

At the very least, we health care professionals need our conscience rights honored and protected so that we can truly and ethically care for our patients. With positions like that of the ANA, nurses with a true respect for the sanctity of human life and the protection of it in all its forms are placed in a distinct disadvantage and are pressured to abandon our profession of caring.

For further information, please contact the Executive Director, Marianne Linane, at director@nursesforlife.org.

 

 

Futility Policies and the Duty to Die (updated)

nancyvalko futility, law, medical ethics

I am on the road this week speaking to groups and doing radio interviews. So here is an article published in Voices magazine (a Catholic women’s’ magazine) in 2003 with an update in 2005.  In the intervening years, the problems have grown worse but I originally wrote this article when almost no one had heard of futility policies. Here is the article.

When I first saw “Jack” last September (2002), he was lying unconscious in an ICU with a ventilator to help him breathe. It had been two weeks since a truck struck the 60 year-old and his injuries were devastating — including broken bones, blunt-force trauma and a severe head injury.

When Jack’s family contacted me about seeing him, they were desperate. The doctors told them that he would never come out of the coma and the issue of withdrawal of treatment was raised. The wife refused.

I could make no guarantees but I gave Jack’s wife a pamphlet on coma stimulation and began visiting Jack weekly.

As an ICU nurse myself, I could see that some of the staff felt that taking care of Jack was a waste of time. So I was not surprised when the family was soon told that nothing more could be done. But it was shocking when the hospital told the family that Jack’s ventilator was going to be removed regardless of their wishes. The family was given a deadline to find another health facility to take him.

By that time, Jack was opening his eyes and his family thought he could squeeze their hands at times. The medical and nursing staff assured them that this was just a “reflex”.

After some frantic phone calls, Jack was transferred to a long care facility that took patients on ventilators. Soon after the transfer, his condition became critical again and the family insisted he be treated. Jack was transferred to a hospital ICU. When the staff found out I was a nurse, some of them asked me what the family’s rationale was for continuing treatment. It was obvious that they too felt Jack was a hopeless case.

But over time, Jack improved and was finally able to breathe on his own without a ventilator so he was transferred to a regular hospital bed. Eventually it became evident to all that Jack was starting to respond to commands but it took pressure to get rehab services for him.

Just before Thanksgiving — a little more than two months after his accident — Jack became fully awake. He is now in a rehabilitation facility near his home in Illinois where the staff is working to strengthen his arms and legs, which were broken in the accident. Now, no one meeting him would ever guess that he had had a brain injury.

Even doctors and nurses who ordinarily disdain religion often call cases like Jack’s “miracles”. Of course, for many in healthcare, it’s easier to believe in miracles than to accept that they were wrong and a life could have been unnecessarily or prematurely lost.

But while Jack’s story has a happy ending, many similar cases do not. Families often automatically accept or are even pressured into accepting a doctor’s grim prognosis for their loved one and withdraw treatment after a patient’s brain is injured by trauma or other conditions like a stroke. Usually, the patient then dies.

Unfortunately, families like Jack’s who choose to continue treatment despite a “hopeless” prognosis are increasingly being denied that choice because of “futile care” policies being adopted in many hospitals throughout the country.

And such “futile care” principles have so permeated much of medicine today that there are even cases of elderly or terminally ill patients expected to have months of life remaining whose doctors didn’t want to prescribe medications such as antibiotics because the person was going to die sooner or later anyway.

Futile Care Policies and “Choice”
Most people assume that either they or their families will have the right to decide about medical treatment when they become seriously or critically ill. The biggest problem, people are told, is that they or their loved one will be tethered to a machine forever if they do not sign a “living will” or other health care directive. The “right to die” movement has convinced most people and medical personnel that the ability to refuse treatment is one of the most important aspects of medical care to prevent patients and families from needless suffering. Indeed, poll after poll shows that most people say they would rather die than be a “vegetable”. And many people automatically assume that they would never want their lives prolonged if they had a terminal illness, were paralyzed or senile, etc. Most people assume that refusing treatment, like assisted suicide (the other goal of the “right to die” movement), means choice and control.

But a funny thing happened on the way to this supposed “right to die” nirvana.

Some families and patients did not “get with the program” and insisted that medical treatment be continued for themselves or their loved ones despite a “hopeless” prognosis and the recommendations of doctors and/or ethicists to stop treatment. Many doctors and ethicists were appalled that their expertise would be challenged and they theorized that such families or patients were unrealistic, “in denial” about the prognosis or were mired in dysfunctional family relationships. (In contrast, families who agree to withdraw treatment are almost always referred to as “loving” and their motives are spared such scrutiny.)

At a 1994 pediatric ethics conference I attended, one participant was even applauded when he suggested that parents who refused to withdraw treatment from their “vegetative” children were being “cruel” and even “abusive” by not “allowing” their children to die. In some cases, doctors and ethicists have even gone to court to force withdrawal of treatment over a family’s objections. These ethicists and doctors were stunned when judges were often reluctant to overrule the families.

Yet over the years and unknown to most of the public, many ethicists have still refused to concede the choice of a right to live and instead have developed a new theory that doctors cannot be forced to provide “inappropriate” or “futile” care and treatment to patients deemed “hopeless”. This theory has now evolved into “futile care” policies at hospitals in Houston, Des Moines, California and many other areas. Even Catholic hospitals are now becoming involved.

In the July-August 2000 issue of the Catholic Health Association’s magazine Health Progress, Catherine M. Mikus and Reverend Peter Clark — a lawyer and an ethicist — argue that it is “time for a formalized medical futility policy” in Catholic hospitals. Like many such articles in secular ethics journals, the authors refrain from being too specific about what conditions and which patients would be subject to such a policy. The authors concede that even the American Medical Association says that medical futility is a concept that “cannot be meaningfully defined” and is a “subjective judgment” on which there is no widespread agreement.

Mikus and Clark make it clear that they are not talking about treatments that are “harmful, ineffective, or impossible”, the traditional concept of medical futility that, of course, is not ethically obligatory. For example, no doctor would honor a family’s request for a kidney transplant for a person who is imminently dying. Instead, the authors argue for a new definition of futility to overrule patients and/or families on a case-by-case basis based on the doctor’s and/or ethicist’s determination of the “patient’s best interest”. Ironically, the “right to die” movement was founded on the premise that patients and/or families are the best judges of when it is time to die. Now, however, we are being told that doctors and/or ethicists are really the best judges of when we should die. This is reminiscent of the imperious statement attributed to Henry Ford that his Model T customers could “paint it any color, so long as it’s black”. Thus the “right to die” becomes the “duty to die”, with futile care policies offering death as the only “choice”.

But despite the lack of consensus on what constitutes futile care, these Catholic authors are passionate about why such policies should be adopted and insist that their policies are “firmly rooted in the Catholic tradition”:

“Proper stewardship of these resources entails not wasting them on treatments that are futile and inappropriate. They must be rationally allocated; to waste them is ethically irresponsible and morally objectionable”. (Emphasis added)

In other words, a social justice-style argument is being made to save money.

Unfortunately, when it comes to Mikus and Clark’s opinions, not only is a sense of humility lacking but also a sense of God’s jurisdiction:

“In assessing whether a treatment is medically futile, physicians must consider carefully not only the values and goals of the patient/surrogate, but also those of the community, the institution, and society as a whole”. (Emphasis added)

This not only ignores God’s ultimate role in life and death but also turns the Hippocratic oath on its head. While the Hippocratic oath is no longer routinely used with medical students, its enduring legacy has always been the sacredness of the commitment of the doctor to his individual patient. Now, new doctors are often told that their ultimate commitment instead resides with the health and welfare of society.

It is appalling that Catholic doctors are now also being encouraged to adopt the secular and utilitarian concept of the greatest good for the greatest number rather than a spiritual commitment to each individual for whom they care. Under this new standard, Jesus the great Healer must be considered a failure for tenderly concerning Himself with healing such “little” lives during His ministry rather than constructing a more “politically correct” health system.

Where Do We Go from Here?
Just a generation ago, doctors and nurses were ethically prohibited from hastening or causing death. Family disputes and ethically gray situations occurred, but certain actions (such as withdrawing medically assisted food and water from a severely brain-injured but non-dying person) were considered illegitimate no matter who was making the decision.

But with the rise of the modern bioethics movement, life is no longer assumed to have the intrinsic value it once did, and “quality of life” has become the overriding consideration. Over time, the ethical question “what is right?” became “who decides?” — which now has devolved into “what is legally allowed?”

Thus, it is not surprising that the Health Progress article on futility policies is subtitled “Mercy Health System’s Procedures Will Help Free Its Physicians from Legal Concerns”. This is no afterthought, but rather the greatest fear of the authors that families may sue.

Doctors are understandably afraid of civil or malpractice lawsuits. In this article, Mikus and Clark attempt to convince doctors that a written futility policy — no matter how vague — is necessary. Then doctors would use the power of an ethics committee to back up their decisions in any legal proceeding in order to prove that the determination of futility meets the hospital’s standard of care.

Even more ominously, there have been efforts to incorporate futile care policy into state and federal law. For example, Senator Arlen Specter introduced the Health Care Assurance Act of 2001 that, while aimed at improving health care for children and the disabled, nevertheless contains a provision that there is no obligation:

“to require that any individual be offered, or to state that any individual may demand, medical treatment which the health care provider does not have available, or which is, under prevailing medical standards, either futile or otherwise not medically indicated”. [Emphasis added.]

The first step in solving a problem is to recognize it. We cannot always rely on a mainstream media that would rather exhaustively cover a star’s shoplifting charge than alert us to thorny ethical problems. Legislation and policies are often developed without public knowledge or comment. Health insurance can no longer be counted on to pay for all needed treatment in many situations.

This is why publications such as Voices and many other Catholic periodicals, pro-life news services and the Internet are so important, especially in the area of ethics. We in the Church are also blessed with encyclicals, Vatican documents and the writings of the doctors of the Church, which give clear principles that are still just as valid and useful as ever in a world of increasing technology and seductive decadence.

If we truly want to protect lives, save souls and fight injustice, we cannot remain silent in the face of an ever-expanding “culture of death”.

Postscript: A couple of years after this was published, Jack was home and doing well when I was contacted by a documentary team from the UK who were making a film about Jack’s experience. I was asked to be a part of this.

I spent a lot of time with the British team and they told me how giving up on someone like Jack would not happen in the UK, despite their government-run National Health Service.

I knew this because in 2000, Dr. Keith Andrews of the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability and his team in the UK had determined that “The slow-to-recover patient is often incorrectly labelled as being in VS (vegetative state)” at a rate of four out of 10. Dr. Andrews and his team developed the SMART (Sensory Modality Assessment and Rehabilitation Technique) to be used in hospitals to reduce the danger of misdiagnosis.

 

 

 

Another Threat to Conscience Rights for Medical Professionals

nancyvalko assisted suicide, conscience rights, medical ethics, nursing

2012 New York Times:  “Instead of attempting to legalize physician-assisted suicide, we should focus our energies on what really matters: improving care for the dying — ensuring that all patients can openly talk with their physicians and families about their wishes and have access to high-quality palliative or hospice care before they suffer needless medical procedures. The appeal of physician-assisted suicide is based on a fantasy. The real goal should be a good death for all dying patients.” (Emphasis added)

2016, Journal of the American Medical Association: “CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are increasingly being legalized, remain relatively rare, and primarily involve patients with cancer. Existing data do not indicate widespread abuse of these practices. (Emphasis added)

The writer of these conflicting views on assisted suicide is Ezekiel J. Emanuel, M.D., PhD., a very influential doctor who is Chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the architects of Obamacare. He is considered an expert on medical ethics who speaks and writes prolifically for both medical journals and general media outlets.

NO CONSCIENCE RIGHTS?

Unfortunately, Dr. Emmanuel is now opposing conscience rights for those of us who object to participating in deliberate death decisions like abortion and assisted suicide.

In his April, 2017 New England Journal of Medicine article “Physicians, Not Conscripts — Conscientious Objection in Health Care” , Dr. Emanuel writes:

“Health care professionals who conscientiously object to professionally  contested  interventions  may  avoid  participating  in them directly, but, as with military conscientious objectors, who are required to perform alternative service, they cannot completely absent themselves from providing  these  services.  Conscientious  objection  still  requires  conveying  accurate  information  and  providing  timely  referrals to ensure patients receive care.”

….

“Health care professionals who are unwilling to accept these limits have two choices: select an area of medicine, such as radiology, that will not put them in situations that conflict with their personal morality or, if there is no such area, leave the profession. “

……

Although the political process may continue unabated, and courts may deem conscience clauses to be legal, it is incumbent on professional societies to affirm professional role morality and authoritatively articulate the professional ethical standards to which all licensed health care professionals must adhere. Laws may allow physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and other health care workers to deny patients treatment or to refuse to care for particular populations, but professional medical associations should insist that doing so is unethical.”

(All emphasis added)

 

CONCLUSION

Please reread that last sentence “Laws may allow physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and other health care workers to deny patients treatment or to refuse to care for particular populations, but professional medical associations should insist that doing so is unethical.”

Some may think this cannot happen in the U.S. or that actions like assisted suicide only occur privately in a patient’s home but, as I wrote in my last blog “Outrage: The American Nurses Association Approves Physician Assisted Starvation Suicide”, the American Nurses Association recently published a position statement “Nutrition and Hydration at the End of Life” that states:

” Decisions about accepting or forgoing nutrition and hydration will be honored, including those decisions about artificially delivered nutrition as well as VSED.”

and

“People with decision-making capacity have the right to stop eating and drinking as a means of hastening death.”

(All emphasis added)

In reality, nurses face an even greater risk than doctors who refuse to participate or refer patients making death decisions.

After assisted suicide was legalized in Oregon, the Oregon Nurses Association quickly issued guidelines for nurses that included these two points for “Nurses Who Choose Not to Be Involved”: “You may not:”

  • Subject your patients or their families to unwarranted, judgmental comments or actions because of their decision to continue to provide care to a patient who has chosen assisted suicide.

  • Abandon or refuse to provide comfort and safety measures to the patient.”  (All emphasis added)

Abandonment is a very big deal in nursing. To be accused of abandoning a patient can result in termination, loss of license or even a lawsuit.

But even if you are not a health care professional, you should be concerned about ethical health care professionals being forced out of health care by taking Dr. Emmanuel’s advice that there are only “two choices: select an area of medicine, such as radiology, that will not put them in situations that conflict with their personal morality or, if there is no such area, leave the profession. ”

Can any of us really trust a health care system that only accepts medical professionals who are just as willing to help end our lives as they are to  care for us?

Outrage: The American Nurses Association Approves Physician Assisted Starvation Suicide

nancyvalko conscience rights, food and water, medical ethics, nursing

“People with decision-making capacity have the right to stop eating and drinking as a means of hastening death.”

and

“There is an extensive knowledge base to help manage the burden of most physical symptoms (of voluntary stopping of eating and drinking). Symptom control is imperative.”

With these quotes from its’ recent position statement “Nutrition and Hydration at the End of Life”, the American Nurses Association (ANA) effectively gives up the principle of opposing physician assisted suicide.

Last November, I wrote a blog when I was alerted off that the ANA  was drafting a new position statement on food and water. The nurse who alerted me included a site for public comment and I urged others to participate as I did.

Now I am saddened but not really surprised to find that final result was the endorsement of decisions withdrawing food and water, even by mouth, and even if the patient is not imminently dying. The statement also explicitly included people with “severe neurological conditions” and dementia.

As the ANA statement makes clear “Decisions about accepting or forgoing nutrition and hydration will be honored, including those decisions about artificially delivered nutrition as well as VSED.” (Emphasis added) VSED stands for voluntary stopping of eating and drinking and is promoted by Compassion and Choices, the former Hemlock Society, as a legal alternative in states without assisted suicide laws.

Here are the ANA’s recommendations on food and water in its’ entirety from the document:

“ANA Recommends that:

  • Nurses recognize those situations when nutrition and hydration can no longer benefit a patient, and adhere to clinical standards that include providing nutrition and hydration only to patients for whom it is indicated.

  • Patients with decision-making capacity—or their surrogates, who are relying on the patients’ preference or have knowledge of the person’s values and beliefs—will be supported in decision-making about accepting or refusing clinically appropriate nutrition and hydration at the end of life.

  • Nurses will have adequate and accurate information to understand patients’ cultural, ethnic, and religious beliefs and values regarding nutrition and hydration at the end of life. Patients’ views and beliefs should be respected.

  • Nurses will support patients and surrogates in the decision-making process by providing accurate, precise and understandable information about risks, benefits and alternatives.

  • Decisions about accepting or forgoing nutrition and hydration will be honored, including those decisions about artificially delivered nutrition as well as VSED.

  • People with decision-making capacity have the right to stop eating and drinking as a means of hastening death.” (All emphasis added)

The ANA position statement admits “There is some consensus (though not universal agreement) that VSED can be an ethical and legal decision”, but in regard to conscience rights, the document only states that  “Nurses who have an informed moral objection to either the initiation or withdrawal of nutrition or hydration should communicate their objections whenever possible, to provide safe alternative nursing care for patients and avoid concerns of patient abandonment.” (Emphasis added)

DOES THE ANA SPEAK FOR ALL NURSES?

The American Nurses Association claims it is the “voice of nursing” and “the nation’s only full-service professional organization that represents the interests of the nation’s 3.6 million registered nurses.”

However, the ANA does not give out its actual membership numbers and the vast majority of the nurses I have encountered over many decades do not belong to the ANA.

I used to belong to the ANA many years ago and was even active in my state’s chapter, hoping to get support for conscience rights after the Nancy Cruzan feeding tube case. But I  became disillusioned when the organization became more politically active and took controversial positions without notifying members. I eventually joined and became active in the National Association of Pro-Life Nurses.

Medical ethics and law has radically changed in just a few decades and now we are confronting physician assisted suicide and other deliberate death decisions.

At the very least, we health care professionals need our conscience rights honored and protected so that we can truly and ethically care for our patients. Unfortunately, the ANA is hurting rather than helping that objective when it comes to nurses refusing to participate in deliberate death decisions.

 

 

 

Planned Parenthood Branches Out

nancyvalko Planned Parenthood, sex ed

When I first read the article “Planned Parenthood’s New Low: Teaching Transgender Ideology to 4-Year-Olds”, I was skeptical.

Although I have long had no illusions about Planned Parenthood since the 1973 Roe v. Wade US Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, its’ promotion  of “comprehensive sex education” in schools, its’ fight against the partial birth abortion ban and the most recent scandal of selling body parts of aborted babies for “research”, I was surprised by this new development.

I went to the Planned Parenthood website to see for myself.

There I found not only the online advice for teaching children as young as preschoolers about transgender issues but also a list of Planned Parenthood facilities across the nation that offer medical services including hormone treatment to people with transgender issues.

But why would Planned Parenthood take on this controversial issue now?

Could money be at least part of the reason?

Not only are some states moving to defund Planned Parenthood of taxpayer money  states along with efforts to defund it federally of the now over half a billion taxpayer dollars annually, but also abortion clinics are shutting down in many states. For example, just in California, three Planned Parenthood abortion facilities closed in June.

And not surprisingly, the most recent scandal about selling body parts of aborted babies has been devastating to Planned Parenthood’s self-proclaimed image as an altruistic dispenser of women’s health services and possibly its’ fundraising efforts.

Another reason for taking on this new issue of transgender identity, which is controversial even among medical experts,  could be that Planned Parenthood portrays itself as an expert on issues of sexuality. And if you regularly read the news, many activists and most mainstream media now seem almost obsessed with the politics surrounding transgender issues.

However, when I was a teenager in the 1960s,  I remember being told that Planned Parenthood was just about contraception and that it said abortion ended the life of a baby before it was born and could impair a woman’s future fertility.

I was an experienced RN by the time the US Supreme Court legalized abortion in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and I discovered about Planned Parenthood’s involvement in abortion years before that decision.

Later, I personally found out that the “comprehensive sex education” that Planned Parenthood promotes was in my children’s public schools and I wrote about this in a 2001 article titled “What About Sex Ed?”. I also joined other concerned parents in objecting to the often biased and inaccurate information our children were receiving. The schools tried to reassure us that our concerns would be addressed in the near future.

But it wasn’t long before we realized that this was a delaying tactic to last until our children graduated. In my case, it was over a decade before my youngest finally graduated but I made sure to teach them myself about the medical, moral and emotional issues surrounding sexuality and health.

Now, this very same school district my now adult children attended is proposing to change its’ curriculum to teach even the very young grade school students  “about topics like gender roles and gender re-assignment” despite many parents publicly and strongly objecting.

CONCLUSION

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America now takes in almost $1.3 billion in total revenue with $528 million in government taxpayer funding and is listed in the top 50 of the largest U.S. charities .

But is Planned Parenthood really a charity needing massive government taxpayer funding or rather more of an enormous business enterprise with strong political ties and an expansive, society-changing agenda that should stand on its own without government funding?

We need the answer to that question as soon as possible.