The Legislative Yuan recently held a hearing on the Patient Right to Autonomy Act (病人自主權利法) and Hospice Palliative Care Act (安寧緩和醫療條例), calling for experts to make recommendations for improvements.
Enacted in 2019, the patient autonomy act stipulates that with advanced written directive, people with one of a list of clinical conditions — including terminal illness, an irreversible coma, permanent vegetative state and severe dementia — can request partial or full withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, artificial nutrition and hydration. However, as of last month, only 45,621 people had signed an advance decision. The latter act gives people diagnosed with a terminal illness by two doctors the right to refuse life-sustaining treatment or cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
At the hearing, Fu Chun-hao (傅俊豪), the son of late sports anchor Fu Da-ren (傅達仁), took to the podium to push for the passing of a “dignified end of life act” (尊嚴善終法) for euthanasia. He said his father, who had pancreatic cancer, endured much pain and suffering before passing away by assisted suicide in Switzerland in 2018. He asked the legislature to revive the bill so that critically ill people can make the choice to live or die with dignity.
The hearing has rekindled the debate surrounding voluntary euthanasia, and exposed the lackluster adoption of advance directives as Taiwan becomes a super-aged nation. Although experts have said the cost is a major impediment to the promotion of advance directives, the main issue could be cultural values and ideology.
There are a number of reasons why Taiwanese generally feel that the autonomy of sick people is limited. Due to the high regard for medical authorities, familial paternalism and the inability to speak for oneself after becoming ill, a proactive attitude is difficult to maintain.
Furthermore, death remains a taboo topic in Taiwan, and the social pressure of “filial piety” makes it difficult not to use all means to “save” an older family member from dying. It means few people have given thorough thought to the complexities around death, let alone considered a proposal like the “dignified end of life act,” which calls for personal control over how one’s life can be ended.
Many Taiwanese prioritize issues concerned with living over the rumination of death, so they have a vague sense about their autonomy to live or die.
Unlike existing rules, the “dignified end of life act” would allow people to actively seek death and shorten life with help, rather than withholding medical care in a way that leads to natural death. The different approaches have sparked moral, ethical and religious debates not only in Taiwan, but across the globe.
Belgium, Canada, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland permit assisted suicide under tight regulations. Taiwan should not fall behind the prevailing view that people with terminal illnesses should be allowed to die with dignity. As euthanasia is a practice based on the idea of empathy and human dignity, legislation of euthanasia would ensure that those who are in irreversible pain can shorten their suffering, while bringing relief to family members.
Life and death are two sides of the same coin. Although euthanasia leads to death, it does so with the intention of living with dignity. If it is no longer possible to live with dignity, people should be given the right to leave the world in a peaceful, controlled way. The government and the public should not shun the topic of death, and should work together to pass the legislation for euthanasia.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
RSS