It would be great if the Union health ministry decides to make public the feedback it gets from citizens to the draft Bill on passive euthanasia. While uploading the Bill on its website last month, the ministry had invited comments by June 19 before taking a final call. The feedback on such a highly emotive issue would be interesting as there has been a debate all over the world on “right to life” and “right to die with dignity”.
However, many say such a debate is futile, as legalising passive euthanasia would be a great relief to terminally ill patients who don’t want to go through the hopeless and painful exercise of having to stay alive. In many ways, what was being done by many doctors on the sly at the request of the patient or his/her close relatives can now be done legally if the Bill is finally enacted. It’s an open secret that many Indians die because someone — doctors, family members or they themselves — has decided it is time to go.
Some doctors have heart-wrenching stories to support the need for passive euthanasia. One doctor told a patient’s son that his father could live for a few days but under excruciating pain as even morphine wasn’t working any more. The doctor called the son aside and said he had two options — either let his father be in this painful state as long as his body could bear it, or take off the life-support devices so that the suffering would end fast. The son opted for the latter. Next morning, his father expired.
The doctor is happy the Bill would help take such decisions without the fear of being prosecuted, as it provides protection to patients and doctors from any liability for withholding or withdrawing medical treatment in cases that are judged to be medically futile.
But a major disappointment about the Bill is that it disallows the concept of “living will”, defined as “a document in which a person states his/her desire to have or to not have extraordinary life-prolonging measures used when recovery is not possible from his/her terminal condition”. This would have helped many take a conscious decision relatively early in their lives whether they were prepared to suffer a painful death in the event of a terminal illness. But Paragraph 11 of the Bill has disallowed it by stating that any “advance medical directive (living will) or medical power of attorney executed by the person shall be void and of no effect and shall not be binding on any medical practitioner”.
Another controversial clause in the Bill could be in allowing even 16-year-olds to take a decision on opting for passive euthanasia. Questions are bound to be asked whether this is prudent in a country where a person is legally not allowed to take any decision before the age of 18. Allowing somebody below that age to decide on something as important as death may be stretching things a bit.
One hopes these crucial glitches will be sorted out in an otherwise well-drafted Bill which, if approved by Parliament, will help India join only a handful of countries that have legalised mercy killing in some form or the other. The first patient in British legal history to be allowed to die was Anthony Bland, who in March 1993, ended up in persistent vegetative state after suffering severe brain damage in a football stadium stampede. After three years, a court allowed the withdrawal of life-prolonging treatment on him. Some states in the US adopted it earlier. Nancy Cruzan of Missouri had a major car accident in 1983. She continued to be fed through a surgically-implanted gastrostomy tube. Nearly eight years after the accident, in 1990, a Missouri court allowed the removal of her artificial feeding system. She died within two hours.
Doctors say the scope of passive euthanasia should be widened to cover some other cases also. Take the 2008 case of Jeet Narayan, a resident of Mirzapur. Narayan pleaded for assisted death for his four sons, all crippled and paralysed below the neck, and there was hardly any money to take care of them. The President of India rejected his plea and no one knows the fate of the family.
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