Monday, April 22, 2019

Oregon Bill HB 2217 would extend assisted suicide to allow euthanasia.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Oregon bill HB 2217 which expands assisted suicide to include euthanasia by redefining "self-administer" passed in the House by a vote of 37 to 21. HB 2217 states:
“Self-administer” means a qualified patient’s physical act of ingesting or delivering by another method medication to end his or her life in a humane and dignified manner.
The difference between euthanasia and assisted suicide is how it is done. Euthanasia is done by one person causing the death of another person, usually by lethal injection. Assisted suicide is when one person is directly involved with causing the death of another person, usually by prescribing lethal drugs that patients take themselves. 

Chris Lehman with KLCC in Oregon explains that HB 2217 enables lethal drugs to be taken by any method, including lethal injection:
Oregon’s “Death With Dignity Act” allows doctors to prescribe lethal medications to people who are thought to have less than six months to live. Patients have to take the medicine themselves. Since the law took effect in the late 90’s, that’s generally been interpreted to mean taking the deadly dose through oral ingestion.

The measure under consideration would clarify that patients could take the medication into their body using any method, including an IV tube or injection.
On January 1, In her article: End-of-Life option laws should avoid needless red tape, Kim Callinan, the CEO of Compassion & Choices, (formerly known as the Hemlock society) argued that assisted suicide laws require fewer regulations. Callinan writes:

If lawmakers want to improve medical aid in dying laws, then let’s address the real problem: There are too many regulatory roadblocks already! I am not suggesting changing the eligibility requirements, as our opposition will suggest. I am merely suggesting that we drop some of the regulations that put unnecessary roadblocks in place.

The assisted suicide lobby considers the homicide laws as a roadblock to assisted suicide. If HB 2217 becomes law, it will create an exception for homicide under the assisted suicide act.

3 comments:

  1. The article says:
    ''Patients have to take the MEDICINE themselves.''
    However, in the dictionary, the word medicine is defined as>>
    ''a compound or preparation used for the treatment or prevention of disease.''
    Newsflash to the deathculture:
    LIFE is not a disease.

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  2. So the argument may be extended to mean that old people, sick people, disabled people, depressed people, and people who are likely to be a drain on the financial system – are all 'Roadblocks'? Let's get rid of those blockers, ASAP!

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  3. Legalizing euthanasia was always the intention of those Left-wingers who passed the "assisted suicide" bills in the first place. Always with deceptive rationales for legalization saying it was to relieve pain in the terminally-ill, however most who use assisted-suicide are not those who are terminally-ill with pain.

    Good pain management can handle the pain issues at the end-of-life. Legalization is about elevating the principle of Autonomy, Self-assertion above all else, so that we do not accept the natural process of dying, but supposedly die "on our own term" ... or at least that's how they "sell" it.

    In fact, people are involuntarily medically killed when a surrogate decision maker "decides for the patient" that they "would want to commit suicide" this way. That is not self initiated suicide, but medical killing by others, which is euthanasia.

    This new initiative simply opens up the process to openly kill people like our elderly mothers and fathers, wives or husbands, even children if they are considered "life unworthy of life" as the Nazis said of those they didn't wish to care for.

    With utilitarians, there is no sanctity of life and they readily end the lives of those God has given to us to care for, love, and be with as brothers and sisters in life.

    Tragic! and evil!

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