Personal end of life decisions should NOT be decided by government or by strangers!

This past week I took a tough, but absolutely principle led vote on an issue that is so very close to me and my family. I voted against Senate bill 1353 because my family and I have been deeply affected by end of life issues that I pray very few others must experience.

Many people do not see S1353 as an “end of life bill”; they see it as a bill which gives caregivers freedom of conscience to apply their beliefs of value structure as to how medical care is dispensed in Idaho.

Others see the bill as a way of preventing more abortions from being carried out by restricting the dispensing of the so-called ‘morning after pill’.

While I, like most Americans, ardently pray for the number of abortions performed in our nation to continue falling and while I believe no caregiver ought to be forced to administer medicine he or she feels is against their personal beliefs, I would like to relay the experience that I have personally had and my serious concern where I see this bill as being flawed.

In my family, Alzheimer’s disease is prevalent. This dreadful, soul-challenging illness has not visited itself on my family once, but numerous times. Alzheimer’s most horrible pain is inflicted on the families of the victim’s and on the victim’s dignity. Most forget ever knowing any of their family members and worse.

My grandmother and nearly all her siblings had it as well. She lived for over 13 years in a nursing facility, the last several years she never got out of bed, never had any idea anyone was there and had zero quality of life. While in the nursing home, caregivers put a feeding tube into her because the facility didn’t believe in letting people die from not eating – you see, my grandmother had forgotten how to chew.

I see that if this bill were in place force-feeding, yes force-feeding; would become a common occurrence here in Idaho again. People who suffer from Alzheimer’s don’t die of other causes. They can live in a vegetative state for decades.

My uncle at age 56 was diagnosed with it. When at some point he caught a cold, it progressed into pneumonia. The family sat down and discussed treatment options. If we gave him antibiotics he would recover and could live for another 20 years in the expensive nursing home setting with no quality of life.

My uncle was a proud Idahoan. He would have been appalled at the indignities he suffered. We opted to withhold treatment. He died from the complications of pneumonia.

In my mother’s case, she had debilitating liver issues. Having witnessed the suffering of her family she had determined the medication needed to keep her alive had such ugly side effects she didn’t want to live with them and personally decided to quit taking the medication. This was her life and her decision. She didn’t think state law would ever possibly prevent this.

But when she was put in a nursing home due to a number of issues, the facility decided, of its own accord, to start giving my mother the medication again. My family sat down with her doctor and explained that she had made her choice and we wanted her to live as comfortably as she could but didn’t want them to continue to give her the medication.

Today, with the benefit of S.1353 if enacted into law, had the nurses felt it was against their moral and ethical beliefs they could have forced us to give my mom the medications allowing her to exist, but with no quality of life. They could have denied my mother her free will  and overridden her specific wishes in order to force her to live her life as they felt it should have been.

With S 1353 in place, the nurses or doctors at the nursing home could have overridden our authority by saying no emergency was evident; in fact we wouldn’t have known we had an option to choose for ourselves.

Why? Because while this bill claims that in an emergency care will be provided, in this bill the word emergency is not defined.

These ends of life decisions are for family to make, not some health care provider who doesn’t know the person or what they would have wanted. These decisions are not for government or strangers to decide.

Protections for health care workers already exist in Idaho code.

We have enough government intrusion into our lives every day. End of life treatments and decisions for a family member are not the place for government to participate.  This is why I voted against the bill.

Joyce