Dr. Errol Baptist

I have practiced medicine in the U.S. as a pediatrician and in a developing country as a family physician, caring for patients from birth to old age. As a patient, I have experienced excruciating pain. I’ve survived cancer, undergone major surgery, and brought these experiences to bear in my role as physician and healer. And at many bedsides, I have seen those same life experiences through the eyes of critically ill people fighting for their lives who are in pain and in distress. And in several shocking instances, they are in distress caused by relatives whose sole support was defined by a desire for the family member to die and trigger whatever windfall awaits.

In medical school, we are taught to do no harm and that all patients are to be treated equally. That we must do all that we can, to relieve their symptoms, to give comfort and care to all patients and their family alike.

The Hippocratic oath, as written 2,400 to 2,600 years ago, included the admonition: “I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect.” It was honored and affirmed by the medical profession for centuries.

Death is not a symptom, and it’s not a cure. It is the enemy we, the physician and the patient, agree to fight together. Whether the act is known as assisted suicide or physician-assisted death or another name that attempts to mask its eugenics-like nature, make no mistake. This is an act of engaging in the process to determine how to kill a patient. This enterprise is not and never has been the role and calling of a physician or any other medical professional under the umbrella of ethical medicine.

Assisted suicide is a final solution to the problem of pain that doesn’t exist given the advances in medicine and particularly in palliative care.

As an example, one man was about 70 years old. He was severely dehydrated and in pain. His family was visibly angry and said he was “too old” and pleaded, “So please let him die.” In a timely manner, treatable problems were solved and immediately thereafter, the family’s loved one was ready to return home. This time, the family was hostile. Our perceptive nursing staff intervened and informed me that his relatives had been emphasizing that they were there to receive their inheritance.

In another equally disturbing incident, one of our team members walked out, saying he was not going to have anything to do with this “blank.” This “blank” was a disabled man who had been admitted to the hospital for pneumonia. “He needs to die,” the team member said.

But what the patient needed was antibiotics, to which he responded promptly, and because of them, he survived a few weeks longer. His family made an appointment to meet me after he passed. They thanked me because the extra time they had had with him brought their contentious family together for the first time in living memory and healed him in a way that no antibiotic ever could.

Another person had terminal cancer and was in pain. The chemotherapy stopped, but her care went on. Our team relieved her pain, and this young girl survived much longer than the specialist initially estimated. The family and this young girl were profoundly grateful for her extended time, which was made possible because of readily available measures. When her time to go came, she quietly slipped away while in the arms of her loved ones.

In each instance, the primary need of the person was to heal and to be provided comfort and extension of life, provided for by readily available means at physicians’ disposal in every Western health-care system. The oath I and other physicians have sworn obliges that “I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect.” What is plainly obvious is that assisted suicide is a solution to a problem that does not exist.

In a just society, there is no medical or scientific or ethical or social need to pressure a member of the disability community into believing that autonomy means choosing death over life. For years now, advances in palliative care and in hospice and in medicine writ large have left assisted suicide and its ableist aims in the eugenics dustbin of history.

Dr. Errol Baptist is a pediatrician in private practice in Rockford, Ill., and a clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Illinois’ College of Medicine at Rockford.