terninal/palliative sedation

Covid 19 and the Culture of Death

nancyvalko advance directives, Compassion & Choices, Covid 19, medical ethics, terninal/palliative sedation, ventilators/life support

“Ironically, the Covid 19 pandemic has pulled back the curtain on how far our healthcare ethics has fallen from the ideal of  respecting every life to the dangerous notion that some lives are expendable-even our own.”

I have written about how the Covid 19 pandemic has resulted in dangerous and unethical responses like ventilator rationing,  unilateral DNRs, and some states ordering nursing homes and other long-term care facilities to accept coronavirus patients discharged from hospitals.

But now,  the Covid 19 crisis has also spawned new ideas such as the American Clinicians Academy On Medical Aid in Dying’s policy recommendations on medically assisted suicide requests by telemedicine in the context of Covid 19  and Covid 19 advance directives aimed at refusing potentially life-saving treatment.

Compassion and Choices, the former Hemlock Society that promotes assisted suicide, voluntary stopping of eating and drinking (VSED) and terminal sedation, now has a Covid 19 toolkit with a special Covid 19 addendum  to add to an existing advance directive to refuse care if a person gets Covid 19. The addendum even contains the question:

“Do you want your healthcare proxy to have the ability to override any of these orders if he or she believes you have a reasonable chance of living a life consistent with your values and priorities based on the information provided by the doctor? Or, do you want these orders followed no matter what?” (Emphasis added)

Another organization “Save Other Souls”, headed by an MD and an ethicist, has an “altruistic” advance directive for Covid 19 that states:

“In the event of shortages during the period of a declared emergency related to COVID-19, and in order to direct resources to others, I am willing to receive palliative care instead of: Critical medical equipment (ventilator, ECMO, etc.), Medication (other than palliative), Placement in a hospital care unit that provides critical care.” (Emphasis added)

Even more disturbing, the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO) has a new resource for Crisis Standards of Care for the “ethical allocation of scarce medical resources during a disaster” that:

“provides a framework for healthcare professionals to utilize a predetermined framework to determine which individuals will receive life saving care during an emergency event or disaster and which ones will not. With the event of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE), it is important for palliative and hospice care providers to be familiar with Crisis Standards of Care.” (Emphasis added)

The National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO), founded in 1978, is the nation’s largest membership organization for providers and professionals who care for people affected by serious and life-limiting illness”. NHPCO states that it “represents the interests of its members and the general public with legislative advocacy that helps to enhance and expand access to care that addresses holistic health and the well-being of communities.” (Emphasis added)

Not surprisingly, the NHPCO has supported  the problematic Palliative Care and Hospice Education and Training Act, currently still in the US Congress awaiting passage.

CONCLUSION

The Covid 19 pandemic is especially terrifying to many people but we must realize that just like any other serious or terminal illness, we must act responsibly and ethically in caring for people with Covid 19.

While medical treatment that is medically futile or unduly burdensome to the person can be ethically refused or withdrawn, refusing or removing ordinary medical treatment or deliberately oversedating a person in order to cause or hasten death is unethical. Even when we think it may help another person get care.

We need to know the difference, especially when it comes to making out “living wills” or other advance directives.

Ironically, the Covid 19 pandemic has pulled back the curtain on how far our healthcare ethics has fallen from the ideal of  respecting every life to the dangerous notion that some lives are expendable-including our own.

 

 

American Academy of Family Physicians Urges the American Medical Association to Drop Opposition to Physician-assisted Suicide

nancyvalko assisted suicide, Compassion & Choices, conscience rights, Living wills, medical ethics, terninal/palliative sedation

Compassion and Choices, the former Hemlock Society and now well-funded promoter of assisted suicide and other death “choices”, is celebrating the new resolution by the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) to oppose the American Medical Association’s (AMA) long-standing opposition to assisted suicide.

The AFFP, the second largest component society of the AMA with over 131,000 members, just approved a new resolution adopting a position of  “engaged neutrality toward medical-aid-in-dying (aka physician-assisted suicide) as a personal end-of-life decision in the context of the physician-patient relationship.” (Emphasis added)

But as Dr. Rebecca Thoman, campaign manager for Doctors for Dignity for Compassion and Choices explained when the Massachusetts Medical Society adopted the same policy in 2017:

A “‘neutral engagement’ position is even better than a simply neutral position. It means if Massachusetts enacts a medical aid-in-dying law, the medical society will offer education and guidance to physicians who want to incorporate medical aid in dying into their practices.” (Emphasis added)

Now, yet another physician-assisted suicide bill is expected to be introduced next year in the Massachusetts legislature.

The AAFP resolution also stated that:

“By supporting the AMA’s opposition to medical aid in dying, some members feel the AAFP is telling them that they are unethical”

and that

“the American Academy of Family Physicians reject(s) the use of the phrase ‘assisted suicide’ or ‘physician-assisted suicide’ in formal statements or documents and direct(s) the AAFP’s American Medical Association (AMA) delegation to promote the same in the AMA House of Delegates.” (Emphasis added)

CONCLUSION

In 1994, Oregon became the first state to pass a physician-assisted suicide law. This came after the Oregon Medical Association changed its position from opposition to neutrality. 21 years later and after multiple failed attempts, the California state legislature approved a physician-assisted suicide law after the California Medical Association changed its opposition to neutrality.

The unfortunate message sent-and received- was that if doctors themselves don’t strongly oppose physician-assisted suicide laws, why should the public?

Still, it was a surprise that in June 2018, the American Medical Association House of Delegates rejected the AMA’s Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs (CEJA) strong report recommending that the AMA continue its long standing policy opposing physician assisted suicide. Instead the delegates “voted 314-243 to refer the matter back to the trustees for further deliberation”.

With the crucial help of a supportive media, Compassion and Choices started this momentum towards acceptance of physician-assisted suicide and other death choices like VSED (voluntary stopping of eating and drinking), terminal sedation and withdrawal of even spoon-feeding, affecting not just doctors but also nurses and other health care professionals and institutions.

In addition, Compassion and Choices also opposes conscience rights, even stating that  the new Federal Conscience and Religious Freedom Division:

“is not about freedom; it’s about denying patient autonomy. Under their proposed rules, providers are encouraged to impose their own religious beliefs on their patients and withhold vital information about treatment options from their patients — up to, and including, the option of medical aid in dying. And your federal tax dollars will be used to protect physicians who make the unconscionable decision to willfully withhold crucial information regarding their care from a patient and abandon them when they are most vulnerable.” (Emphasis added)

However, here are a few ways any of us can help turn around this dire situation:

When the most basic medical ethic of not killing patients or helping them to kill themselves can be discarded in favor of “choice” or “quality of life”,  none of us of us can afford to be neutral- or silent-on this life or death issue.

Alfie Evans and the Shocking UK Gosport Independent Panel Report

nancyvalko end-of-life, food and water, futility, law, medical ethics, nursing, palliative care, terninal/palliative sedation

The Baby Alfie Evans’s case this year shocked the world but now we learn his forced death against his parents’ wishes follows a legal and healthcare nightmare in the UK.

Some of us expressed concerns years ago about the UK’s “Liverpool Care Pathway” developed in the 1990s to improve care of the dying by applying “the high standard of palliative care prevalent in hospices to other clinical settings”.  But the “Liverpool Care Pathway” went horribly wrong and in 2009, the UK Daily Mail published an article “Euthanasia by the back door: Hospitals ‘death pathway’ is open to error” with cases of non-dying patients considered “not worth saving” who died from the “combination of dehydration and powerful painkillers”, explaining that:

“Under the Liverpool Care Pathway, doctors can withdraw fluids and drugs from patients if they are deemed close to death. Many are then put on continuous sedation so they die free of pain.

But sedation can often mask signs of improvement, meaning doctors may be closing the door on people who would otherwise live for months.”

In 2013, the British Journal of General Practice published “The Liverpool Care Pathway for the dying: what went wrong?” . The authors acknowledged the problems that led an independent review to call for an end to the Liverpool Care Pathway but concluded that:

“(a)vacuum left by the abolition of the LCP makes a return to the ‘bad old days’ of poor or non-existent communication about dying a real possibility: we would argue that the response to poor use should be right use, not non-use” and  called for “increased funding and training in palliative care and suggest that skills in end-of-life care should become a required competency for all health care professionals.” (Emphasis added)

THE GOSPORT INDEPENDENT PANEL REPORT

More details of this scandal have just now surfaced in a report on the Gosport War Memorial Hospital  where patients were often admitted for rehabilitation or respite care. The report concludes that at least 450 patients had their lives “shortened” by denial of food and water along with powerful painkillers between 1989 and 2000. It details cases and concerns and ultimately acknowledges the families’ years-long pleas for the truth. Here is one excerpt:

“Those (nurses) who raise concerns about the conduct and practice of colleagues are now widely known as ‘whistle-blowers’. To put it into context, it is generally agreed that the NHS (National Health Service) has not been good at protecting people who take such a difficult step; as the documents make clear, the events of 1991 were no exception. Nor should the consequences for whistle-blowers be underestimated: these commonly included disciplinary action and undermining of professional credibility.”

“The documents show that, following a complaint to the Trust in 1998 and the police investigation, it should have become clear to local NHS organisations that there was a serious problem with services at the hospital. Although the successive police investigations undoubtedly complicated the NHS response, it is nevertheless remarkable that at no stage was there a public admission of failure or any public apology. Nor was there a proportionate clinical investigation into what had happened. On the contrary, the documents show numerous instances of defensiveness and denial – to families, to the public and the media, and to health service and other organisations.” (Emphasis added)

CONCLUSION

Will charges now be brought against those involved in the Gosport War Memorial Hospital euthanasia deaths? Who knows? The Independent Panel only concluded that:

“With this Report and an online archive of documentation, the Panel has completed its Terms of Reference. The Panel now calls upon the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and the relevant investigative authorities to recognise the significance of what is revealed by the documentation in this Report and to act accordingly.”

But just as important is the question “Has health care now improved?”

Unfortunately, the answer may be no.

As the UK Telegraph reported in 2015 in the article “New NHS (National Health Service) death guidelines ‘worse than Liverpool Care Pathway’”, the Liverpool Care Pathway was supposedly phased out in 2014 in favor of the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines. but families were still reporting poor end of life care, including denial of food and water.

And now, unlike that Liverpool Care Pathway horrors that were hidden for so long, we had the very public case of Baby Alfie Evans this year where courts enforced the doctors’ decision to shorten his life by removing his ventilator, refused his family’s requests to transfer him or take him home and even take away his feedings when he continued to breathe for days after the ventilator was removed.

Apparently, the death culture is apparently very hard to kill in the UK and, as we are finding, also in the US.

What You Need to Know Now That the District of Columbia Has Become the Seventh Jurisdiction in US to Legalize Assisted Suicide

nancyvalko advance directives, assisted suicide, Compassion & Choices, end-of-life, Kevorkian, law, medical ethics, terninal/palliative sedation

Despite emails and other efforts to encourage the US Congress to exercise its legal authority to stop the Washington D.C. assisted suicide law, the expected congressional action was not completed within the 30 legislative days required.

However, there may be hope on the horizon according to a  February 18, 2017 Washington Times article that said “Congress can still neutralize the Death with Dignity Act by cutting off its funding through the appropriations process.”

What went wrong with the process of nullifying the assisted suicide law in time?  No one seems to know.

But one thing we do know is that Compassion and Choices, the well-funded assisted suicide activist organization, will continue its relentless fight over and over again in every state without an assisted suicide law and in the courts to make assisted suicide legal throughout the US. But even that is not the final goal.

Ominously, we are now seeing assisted suicide leaders like influential lawyer Kathryn Tucker even criticizing the so-called “safeguards” in assisted suicide laws  as “burdens and restrictions”. She now argues that  assisted suicide should be “normalized within the practice of medicine”.

WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW AND DO NOW

We cannot just depend on lobbying our politicians and legislatures to fight assisted suicide only when such bills are introduced in states legislatures or as public initiative votes. We must constantly reinforce our message that every life is worthy of respect and care, not medical termination.

But we must also understand that the assisted suicide/euthanasia movement has had decades of experience in shaping and publicizing its lethal message through carefully crafted steps to convince the public that physician-assisted suicide must be legalized to prevent or end suffering.

As I wrote in my 2013 article “Then and Now: The Descent of Ethics”, the assisted suicide/euthanasia movement has been very busy in the last several decades. I included a short history of the movement that people should know:

The 1970s brought the invention of “living wills” and the Euthanasia Society of America changed its name to the Society for the Right to Die. The so-called “right to die” movement received a real boost when the parents of Karen Quinlan, a 21-year-old woman considered “vegetative” after a probable drug overdose, “won” the right to remove her ventilator with the support of many prominent Catholic theologians. Karen continued to live 10 more years with a feeding tube, much to the surprise and dismay of some ethicists. Shortly after the Quinlan case, California passed the first “living will” law.

Originally, “living wills” only covered refusal of life-sustaining treatment for imminently dying people. There was some suspicion about this allegedly innocuous document and, here in Missouri, “living will” legislation only passed when “right to die” advocates agreed to a provision exempting food and water from the kinds of treatment to be refused.

But, it wasn’t long before the parents of Missouri’s Nancy Cruzan, who was also said to be in a “vegetative” state, “won” the right to withdraw her feeding tube despite her not being terminally ill or even having a “living will.” The case was appealed to the US Supreme Court, which upheld Missouri law requiring “clear and convincing evidence” that Nancy Cruzan would want her feeding tube removed, but, in the end, a local judge allowed the feeding tube to be removed. Shortly after Nancy’s slow death from dehydration, Senators John Danforth and Patrick Moynihan proposed the Patient Self-Determination Act (never voted upon but became law under budget reconciliation), which required all institutions to offer all patients information on “living wills” and other advance directives. Since then, such directives evolved to include not only the so-called “vegetative” state and feeding tubes but virtually any other condition a person specifies as worse than death and any medical care considered life-sustaining when that person is deemed unable to communicate.

But this “choice” is becoming an illusion. In 1999, Texas became the first state to pass a medical futility law to allow doctors and/or medical committees to  override advance directives and patient or family decisions to continue life-sustaining treatment on the basis that doctors and/or medical committees know best when to stop treatment.

In the 1990s, Jack Kevorkian went public with his self-built “suicide machines”  and the “right to die” debate took yet another direction. By the end of the decade, Oregon became the first state to allow physician-assisted suicide. At first, the law was portrayed as necessary for terminally ill people to die with allegedly unrelievable pain. Within a short time, though, it was reported that “according to their physicians, the patients requested assistance with suicide because of concern about loss of autonomy and control of bodily functions, not because of concern about inadequate control of pain or financial loss.”

Other states eventually followed Oregon but efforts to pass assisted suicide laws often failed in other states so Compassion and Choices (the former Hemlock Society) promoted palliative/terminal sedation and VSED (voluntary stopping of eating and drinking) as a legal alternative to assisted suicide in states without such laws.

Compassion and Choices has found much success in working with sympathetic news outlets and pollsters to encourage the public and even medical professionals to support assisted suicide.

Even TV’s popular Dr. Phil McGraw hosted a 2012 segment featuring a Canadian woman who wanted her adult disabled children to die by lethal injection. Ironically, the mother, along with former Kevorkian lawyer Geoffrey Feiger, argued that removing their feeding tubes was an “inhumane” way to end the lives of the adult children. Tragically, when the studio audience was polled, 90% were in favor of lethal injections for the disabled adults. Disability organizations protested after the show, writing that “By conveying social acceptance and approval of active euthanasia of individuals with disabilities by their family members, the segment threatens their very lives”.

Exploiting the natural fear of suffering most people have has also led to a growing acceptance of the premise that it can even be noble to choose death instead of becoming a burden on family members or a drain on society. It is up to us to combat this attitude of despair by  not only educating ourselves and others about the facts and dangers of assisted suicide but also by offering hope and support to those of us most at risk.

High Priority: Public Comments Needed on ANA’s New Draft Position Paper on Denying Food and Water

nancyvalko assisted suicide, conscience rights, end-of-life, law, medical ethics, nursing, terninal/palliative sedation

Although the American Nurses Association (ANA) claims it represents the over 3 million US nurses, only a tiny fraction of nurses actually belong. ANA does not give out the actual number of members. I used to belong both my state nursing organization as well as the ANA to try to uphold good nursing ethics and conscience rights for nurses. I finally gave up when my state organization would not address even the conscience rights of nurses in the Nancy Cruzan feeding tube case. I gave up on the ANA when I discovered that the ANA opposed a ban on partial birth abortion without notifying its membership. I only found this out when I watched a TV show on politics mentioning the ANA position. I called the ANA public relations department myself to protest both their position and not notifying members like me and resigned.

Yesterday, I received a call from a nurse in another state who sent me the website for public comments due by 5 pm ET 12/1/2016 about a proposed new ANA position on nutrition and hydration at the end of life.

The proposed position paper is 9 pages long and I sent the following comments with the referenced lines as requested. It would have taken me many pages to address all the issues:

Lines 18-24.  In the past, the hospice principle of never prolonging or hastening death at the end of life was paramount. Now, this has been subjugated to a legalized autonomy (even when exercised by a third party) to decide when to hasten death.

However, nurses are professionals whose integrity depends on proper respect for their conscience rights, especially when it comes to decisions about hastening death.  This concern is absent in this draft.

We do have such a provision in Missouri law that states:

Missouri Revised Statutes
Section 404.872.1

Refusal to honor health care decision, discrimination prohibited, when.

404.872. No physician, nurse, or other individual who is a health care provider or an employee of a health care facility shall be discharged or otherwise discriminated against in his employment or employment application for refusing to honor a health care decision withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining treatment if such refusal is based upon the individual’s religious beliefs, or sincerely held moral convictions.

(L. 1992 S.B. 573 & 634 § 7)

Line 88: There is no definition of “severe neurological conditions”.
Line 90 on “Dementia, recognized as a terminal illness associated with anorexia and cachexia”.  As a former hospice nurse and caregiver for my mother until her death as well as a volunteer for people with dementia, this is an alarming and potentially dangerous assertion. No one should have to die by dehydration and indeed many people with dementia can be spoon-fed like my mother until natural death. I have likewise seen several people begging for food or water but denied because of a decision not to place a feeding tube or spoon feed.

Lines 101-104. VSED as described is really assisted suicide and implicitly changes ANA opposition to medically assisted suicide.

Also, in a New York Times article in October titled “The VSED Exit: A Way to Speed Up Dying, Without Asking Permission”, Dr. Timothy Quill (past president of the AAPHM and the doctor arguing for the constitutionality of assisted suicide in the 1997 Vacco v Quill US Supreme Court case) was quoted as claiming that while VSED is “generally quite comfortable at the beginning”, he also states that “You want a medical partner to manage your symptoms,” because “It’s harder than you think.”

How hard?

In 2000, Quill and Dr. Ira Byock (a palliative care doctor who speaks against legalizing physician-assisted suicide while also supporting VSED and terminal sedation) wrote an article titled “Responding to Intractable Terminal Suffering: The Role of Terminal Sedation and Voluntary Refusal of Food and Fluids” . The patient was a doctor who wanted to die before his symptoms became worse. He was given a morphine drip that had to be increased to total unconsciousness on day 10 because he became “confused and agitated and began having hallucinations”.

Lines 114-115 cite “Psychological, spiritual, or existential suffering, as well as physical suffering” but only say that “Symptom control is imperative” rather than oppose participation in VSED  for people who are not even terminally ill.

Lines 149-150 state that “Decisions about accepting or forgoing nutrition and hydration will be honored including those decisions about artificially delivered nutrition as well as VSED”. This blanket statement destroys the conscience rights of nurses as well as our duty to advocate for our patients’ best interests. (Emphasis added)

Ironically, the ANA’s 2010 position paper on reproductive rights (i.e. abortion) states that:

“Also,nurses have the right to refuse to participate in a particular case on ethical grounds. However, if a client’s life is in jeopardy, nurses are obligated to provide for the client’s safety and to avoid abandonment.” (Emphasis added) Apparently, the ANA is proposing that the right to refuse to participate ends when the death of the patient is deliberately intended.

CONCLUSION

Just this week, it was reported that a union for Australian nurses is backing voluntary euthanasia. The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation (SA branch) is even partnering with other Compassion and Choices-style groups in Australia to pass a voluntary euthanasia bill. This could well be our future here in the US if we do not respond.

As nurses and citizens, we need to fight for truly patient-safe health care by responding to groups like the ANA through comments sections like the one above (which ends December 1) and in the media. We must also support and insist on ethical health care providers for ourselves and our loved ones as well as protecting our patients. As much as we can, we can also help state and national organizations that fight against euthanasia.

Especially if you are a nurse, consider joining the National Association of Pro-Life Nurses and following our Facebook page.

Our profession, our patients and even our nation are at stake!

 

 

The “Miracle” of Dying (in hospice without food and water)

nancyvalko end-of-life, food and water, terninal/palliative sedation

Recently, a fellow nurse sent me an article she found disturbing titled “The miracle of dying” from the Los Angeles archdiocesan newspaper.

The article is ostensibly about the laudable goal of promoting emotional and spiritual healing for a dying person with comprehensive hospice and palliative care when cure is not possible.

Unfortunately, the article begins with the story told by Diane, dean of nursing at a Catholic university in California, about her father’s death. Diane’s frail, 99 year old father living in a Florida assisted living facility with no apparent life-threatening illness called her to say “I’ve outlived my usefulness. I’m ready to go”. When he decided to quit eating and drinking, Diane arranged for hospice care.

According to the article, it wasn’t long before the hospice nurse called back, saying it would take about 48 hours for her father to die and Diane took a flight to Florida to be there when he died.  The obvious impression left is that her father’s wish to stop eating and drinking was granted by the hospice.

Was Diane’s father evaluated physically and psychologically?  I have seen many elderly people who also felt their lives were useless successfully treated for depression as well as elderly people who had physical problems with eating regain their health with professional help. Why would we just send them to a hospice without exploring other options?

When I worked in hospice years ago, we would never have approved deliberate starvation and dehydration even at the patient’s request. We followed the trusted hospice philosophy that we neither hasten nor prolong the dying process. Unfortunately, we are seeing that ethical standard eroding to just honoring a patient’s “choice” to die. Ominously, state reports in Oregon, the first state to legalize physician-assisted suicide show that over 90% of reported physician-assisted suicide victims were enrolled in hospice.

Terminal Sedation

The rest of the article discusses death and California’s new physician-assisted suicide law with an ethicist and a doctor connected with Catholic health care institutions. While neither man supports the new California assisted suicide law, the comments by Roberto Dell’Oro, director of Loyola Marymount University’s Bioethics Institute are particularly alarming. Note this section from the article:

“For years, doctors have performed what’s known as “terminal sedation,” not to end somebody’s life but to make their patients more comfortable. Estimates of very seriously ill patients being terminally sedated have ranged from 2 to more than 50 percent. But the subject is rarely brought up in public.

One of the pillars it rests on goes back to the “double-effect” rule attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, which justifies killing in times of war and for self-defense.

Regarding end-of-life matters, the principle posits that even when there’s a foreseeable bad outcome (death), it is morally acceptable if the intentional good outcome (relief of pain) outweighs it.

‘It’s a matter of stopping feeding and increasing pain medication that leaves you to die,’ explained Dell’Oro. ‘It’s not the practice of assisted suicide. Because the motivation, the intentionality of the physician remains the alleviation of pain, not the killing of the patient. That’s the fundamental difference.’ (emphasis added)

Unfortunately, this ethicist’s quote echoes Jack Kevorkian’s defense that he was just “relieving suffering” not mercy-killing his victims when he hooked them up to his death machine. There is a big difference between adequately treating pain even if that would diminish a person’s consciousness and deliberately rendering a person unconscious until death while withholding food and water. And now we have ethicists supporting terminal sedation for even “intractable emotional or spiritual anguish”.

COMPASSION AND CHOICES

Compassion and Choices is the pro-assisted suicide organization formerly known as The Hemlock Society and made famous by the Brittany Maynard physician-assisted suicide case. On its’ website, Compassion and Choices describes voluntary stopping of eating and drinking (VSED) and terminal sedation as good end of life options:

Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking – When patients die naturally of chronic diseases, such as cancer, bodily changes take away their appetite, and they stop eating before they die. Some people decide to speed up the dying process by voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED), which also relieves some of the symptoms common to dying. If a patient is already close to death, VSED usually leads to death in one to three weeks. Many people have used this method successfully….C&C believes hospice care is essential during VSED.” (Emphasis added)

In the case of terminal sedation which they call “palliative sedation”, it is described as:

Some dying patients experience so much pain or such unmanageable symptoms they cannot get relief from medications unless the dose is high enough to make them unconscious. Palliative sedation provides enough medication to keep the person unconscious and continuously pain and symptom-free. All nutrients and fluids are stopped, and the person usually dies within a few days. Patients using palliative sedation should be monitored around the clock to be sure the sedation is adequate. Intensive monitoring can be done at home under hospice care. (Emphasis added)

Of course, Compassion and Choices is working to legalize physician-assisted suicide throughout the US but, in the meantime, note that it endorses VSED (voluntary stopping of eating and drinking) and terminal sedation in hospice as a legal alternative.

When I was a hospice nurse in the mid-1990s, terminal sedation and withholding food and water were unthinkable.  We worked hard to make sure our terminally ill patients and their families had physical, emotional and spiritual support. It was gratifying to hear our patients and families tell us how meaningful and even healing the experience was. I even saw some dying people unexpectedly linger until an issue was resolved, a loved one came to the bedside or even until the family was ready.

When we try to just get death over with as soon as possible, we are really abandoning our dying patients and their families at  one of the most important and momentous events in their lives. We need to respect death not accelerate it.