Death with dignity

Legal system needed to ensure peaceful deaths

A committee under the president has decided to push ahead with a legal system allowing for the cessation of life support for terminally-ill patients in an effort to ensure peaceful and less painful deaths.

The National Bioethics Committee held its second meeting for this year Friday and reached an agreement to set up an ad-hoc panel to institutionalize “death with dignity.’’

This means that the government will actively consider letting terminally-ill patients reject CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) or artificial respiration. We welcome the decision, given the rising demand for a cessation of excessive treatment for people in the last phase of an incurable disease.

The committee’s plan to conduct a survey on people’s perception about contentious issues associated with death with dignity is a step in the right direction, considering that many people, especially those from religious circles, oppose it.

Death with dignity envisions ceasing excessive treatments such as life support administered to simply extend the lives of people in the last phase of a terminal illness. Euthanasia is different from death with dignity in that it refers to the practice of ending a life intentionally in order to relieve pain and suffering.

The need to institutionalize death with dignity was raised in 2009, when the Supreme Court approved a terminally-ill patient’s right to choose “death with dignity’’ in an unprecedented ruling. The court, in a case of a 77-year-old comatose woman, ruled that her family members could remove her feeding tube and take her off life support. Her family then claimed that the woman had expressed her wish to refuse excessive and meaningless treatment when she was healthier. She lived for another 201 days after her life support was removed.

Since then, the government has sought to institutionalize death with dignity, and a relevant law was initiated at the National Assembly. In 2010, leaders from various walks of life formed a consultative group to form a social consensus. But these efforts were futile because such issues as to whether to recognize “presumed consent” ― family members, not patients, asking for the cessation of life support ― became controversial.

True, dissenting opinions on death with dignity are understandable, given the rationale for a cautious approach toward life, but the reality doesn’t warrant leeway.

More than anything, there is a strong need to free patients and their family members from pain and fear. According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, of about 250,000 annual deaths, 180,000 are from chronic diseases such as cancer and 30,000 of them die after being on life support.

In a recent survey, about 72 percent agreed to the removal of life support for patients in the last phase of an incurable disease. Already, a number of countries such as the Netherlands permit death with dignity.

The government and the National Assembly should do what they can to institutionalize the practice this time in such a direction as to strictly define requirements for death with dignity. <The Korea Times>