Luo Diandian campaigns for death with dignity
General's daughter Luo Diandian has met fierce resistance to her views on dying and death. She explains why people should change
Most mainlanders spare no effort to obtain the best medical treatment available to extend the lives of loved ones in the terminal stage of an illness, but 61-year-old Luo Diandian is calling for a different approach: let loved ones die with dignity rather than draw out their suffering. It's a mindset that is understandably met with a lot of resistance in mainland society, where death remains a taboo subject, but the youngest daughter of revolutionary general Luo Ruiqing has continued to push forwards with a campaign she calls "Choice and Dignity", despite the opposition she frequently encounters.
About 10 years ago my friends and I had to make a hard choice about whether to ask doctors to continue treating our elderly relatives who were unconscious and at death's door, and whose bodies were inserted with numerous tubes in order to maintain their lives, or tell the doctors to pull the plugs. Death is inevitable for everyone, and all of us should think about our deaths. In a situation when we are declared by doctors to be incurable and given up to six months to live, shall we choose to lie in a medical ward, surrounded by life-support machines and filled with tubes, or should we die naturally and without radical treatment? In China, we don't like to speak the word "death", but I believe that many people have considered this. In 2006, we held a forum in Beijing called "Seizing Our Destinies", and it was attended by dozens of people, including doctors, lawyers, writers and some Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference delegates. We concluded that we should open a website to express our view that everyone is entitled to choose how to die, and we want to advocate dying with dignity. We want to remind the public that it's necessary for each adult to write a living will about his or her preferences, in terms of medical treatment, when he or she reaches the terminal stage of life. That is in contrast to the current scenario in which family members generally decide.
They are considerably different. In my eyes, euthanasia is a practice to speed up death at the consent of patients; while our proposal is to let nature take its course and never procrastinate or accelerate the rhythm of death. What we suggest is that, when we are declared by doctors to be in the terminal stage of our lives, we don't need to be hooked up to respirators; when our heartbeat stops, we don't need CPR. Don't give us expensive antibiotics, and don't let us receive other medical treatment that will cause us pain. After terminating the life-supporting system, we believe hospice care and the love of family members are imperative. As a former doctor with decades of experience, I find that patients who receive treatment incorporating cutting-edge technology and medicine end up facing a dilemma, because if they want to die they can't, and if they want to live, they are already seriously ill and it's impossible for them to recover. I see them suffering a lot.