Natalie Harp was urged to request assisted suicide in California.

This article was published by the American Spectator on August 26, 2020.

Natalie Harp is living proof of the importance of the “right to try.”

Natalie Harp

By Wesley Smith

The threat of assisted suicide is a portentous issue of our day that many politicians pretend isn’t there. Republicans, in particular, have tended to hide under their desks about it. That may be because the question of legalizing doctor-prescribed death and/or euthanasia doesn’t usually make pollsters’ lists of issues that drive people to the polls, and the media enjoy depicting opponents of assisted suicide legalization as people who want others to suffer.

Ignoring this issue is not the kind of leadership that our country needs. Indeed, the question of whether or not to allow killing to become an acceptable answer to human suffering could not be more important, both culturally and morally.

When we accept assisted suicide, we are not really being compassionate, but rather are tacitly validating surrender to darkness. But by opposing the “give them the pills” expedient (that’s what it really is), and instead committing unequivocally to caring for the terminally ill with loving concern, we can insure that dying people are not made to feel like burdens or allowed to believe we will allow them to wallow in misery. In doing so, we value their equality and uphold the intrinsic dignity of their lives.

That’s a difficult message to communicate in our soundbite culture — particularly when so much communication these days is mere emoting. Indeed, most depictions of assisted suicide in the media and popular culture extol people who commit suicide as empowered and “dying on their own terms.” For example, who hasn’t seen the image of the late Brittany Maynard photographed with a cute puppy when the media reports on an assisted suicide? Maynard was made an A-list celebrity by the media back in 2014 when, tragically diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, she began campaigning to legalize doctor-prescribed death. CNN even named her one of 2014’s “extraordinary persons,” simply because she killed herself — with no real reportage about how the symptoms and difficulties of dying from brain cancer can be ameliorated with proper medical care. In fact, when the palliative care expert Ira Byock was interviewed on national television about that potential, he was castigated for interfering with Maynard’s “choice.”

With that kind of propaganda machine pushing assisted suicide, perhaps we can understand why Republicans have never brought it up at their national convention. That changed Monday night. Natalie Harp — who has survived diagnosed terminal bone cancer — proved that hope can be found even in situations seemingly bereft of anything but tragedy. From her speech:

The Democrats love to talk about health care being a human right. But a right to what? Well, I’ll tell you. To them, it’s a right to marijuana, opioids, and the right to die with “dignity” — a politically correct way of saying … assisted suicide.

Harp was not saying palliation is a bad thing. Nobody would. Pain and symptom control is an essential component of contemporary medicine that everyone should support. But she was warning us that these important medical fields should not be treated as a metaphorical elephant’s graveyard where people are sent to die.

In her speech, Harp identified a real problem powerfully and succinctly:

I was told I was a burden to my family and to my country — and that by choosing to die early, I’d actually be saving the lives of others by preserving resources for them rather than wasting them on a lost cause like myself.

Can you imagine the pain of that? Can you imagine how such treatment could induce one to want to commit assisted suicide, whether for fear of symptoms or worries about being a burden?

Harp saved her life with the new “right-to-try” law that permits terminally ill people to access treatments not yet approved by the FDA. The experimental care worked, allowing her to appear on national television to tell the tale.

But one can imagine a different scenario. Depressed and dejected, told there is no hope, she could have requested poison pills — unaware that a different choice would bring continued life. And a doctor — so compassionately — acquiesces in the death.

By the way, such “the patient didn’t die as expected” scenarios happen sometimes in situations that do not involve right-to-try. I experienced such a case as a hospice volunteer.

When I first met Ernie, an elderly man expected to die of congestive heart failure, he fell into my arms, crying, “I want to die! I want to die! I want to die!” When I asked him why, he said he worried about burdening his son. I assured him that wasn’t true and notified the care team about Ernie’s deep depression so they could intervene with social and mental health services.

About three months later, I lost Ernie — not because he died, but because his health had so unexpectedly improved that he was kicked out of hospice care!

If assisted suicide had been available in California at that time — as it is today — I believe Ernie would have asked for the poison pills, he was in such despair over his situation. Look at what he would have missed — and no one would have ever known. In this regard, it is worth noting that the humorist Art Buchwald was placed in hospice care with kidney failure. He too eventually left hospice and lived long enough after that to write his last book.

That isn’t the usual course for most hospice patients, of course. But that fact doesn’t justify assisted suicide either. Hospice help patients in their last stage of life live well and with great quality. Indeed, it is something of a hospice cliché that patients tell caregivers they would not have missed their final weeks and months in hospice for anything. A few of my patients told that to me too.

By allowing Harp to walk where Republicans usually fear to tread, the Trump campaign has done a big favor to the most weak, vulnerable, and, too often, abandoned among us. Harp’s advocacy to never give up on patients, to embrace care and not killing, has opened the door to explore these issues in greater depth going forward. Thank you, Natalie Harp!

Award-winning author Wesley J. Smith is chairman of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism and a consultant to the Patients Rights Council.

The Extreme Ableism of Assisted Suicide

The following article was published by Not Dead Yet on January 28, 2020

By Diane Coleman, President & CEO Not Dead Yet

Diane Coleman

I just came across a brilliant letter that John Kelly sent to the Washington, D.C. Council when they were considering an assisted suicide bill in 2016. I should have posted it here then, but I am doing so now because it’s one of the best discussions I’ve read of the core problem that assisted suicide advocates have with disability.

Let me just highlight one example from the letter, a Washington Post quote from Dan Diaz, who is still working for Compassion and Choices, traveling around the country doing press conferences and testifying on their behalf in favor of these dangerous bills.

“If I find myself in a situation where I can’t go to the bathroom on my own, where someone has to change my diapers, where I can’t feed myself, where I can’t care for the people around me, where other people have to move me around to keep me from having bedsores, I would then submit, ‘Is that really living?’ ” Diaz said. 

Although assisted suicide proponents often accuse opponents of fearing death, the letter below demonstrates how profoundly proponents fear and loath disability. Their ableism is so extreme that they want to carve a vaguely defined segment of old, ill and disabled people out of suicide prevention, enlist our healthcare system in streamlining our path to death, and immunizing everyone involved from any legal consequences, thereby denying us the equal protection of the law.

November 1, 2016

Chairman Mendelson, Councilmembers:

John Kelly

My name is John Kelly. I am the New England Regional Director for Not Dead Yet, the national disability rights group that has long opposed euthanasia and assisted suicide. I am also the director of Not Dead Yet’s Massachusetts state affiliate, Second Thoughts MA: Disability Rights Advocates against Assisted Suicide.

I refer you to two recent articles in the Washington Post. Read together, they must lead you to vote against assisted suicide bill B21-38. Assisted suicide isn’t about physical pain at all, despite what proponents have told you. And assisted suicide benefits one specific group in the district and country, wealthier white people, while disadvantaging poorer people, and people of color specifically.

The first article came out last Monday, October 24. Titled “‘Death with dignity’ laws and the desire to control how one’s life ends,” this article exposes the main argument for assisted suicide, “that terminally ill patients have the right to die without suffering intractable pain in their final days or weeks,” as a big lie.

Author Liz Szabo reports that assisted suicide proponent group Compassion & Choices “focuses heavily on the need to relieve dying patients of pain.” One ad has the assisted suicide bill giving “a dying person the option to avoid the worst pain and suffering at the end of life.”

Yet the latest research shows that terminally ill patients who seek aid in dying aren’t primarily concerned about pain. Those who have actually used these laws have been far more concerned about controlling the way they exit the world than about controlling pain.

As one California doctor said, “It’s almost never about pain. It’s about dignity and control.”

And that’s what the Oregon and Washington data show. Pain is the least of people’s concerns. Doctors report people requesting the lethal drugs because of psychosocial suffering about becoming disabled through their illness. It’s mental distress about becoming dependent on other people (“losing autonomy” 92%), losing abilities (“less able to engage in activities making life enjoyable” 90%), shame and perceived/actual loss of social status (“loss of dignity” 79%), needing help with incontinence (“losing control of bodily functions” 48%), and believing that suicide would leave loved ones better off (“burden on family, friends/caregivers” 41%).

Dr. Ira Byock, a leading palliative care expert, told the Post, “it’s a bait and switch. We’re actually helping people hasten their deaths because of existential suffering. That’s chilling to me.” As Byock said, almost all pain is controllable. Hospice staff are on call 24 hours a day, and caregivers can be trained in administering emergency pain medication until staff arrive.

The real reasons that people want to commit assisted suicide, proponents admit, are about being dependent on other people for personal care. We disability rights activists have been pointing this out all along.

Barbara Coombs Lee, who as an insurance company executive wrote Oregon’s assisted suicide law, brought up the case of the woman who committed assisted suicide because she was incontinent. The woman wrote that “the idea of having somebody take care of me like I am a little 2-month-old baby is just absolutely repulsive. It’s more painful than any of the pain from the cancer.”

Lee described scenarios of disability that she said were “worse than death.” Proponent Dan Diaz emphasized the supposed horrors of disability.

“If I find myself in a situation where I can’t go to the bathroom on my own, where someone has to change my diapers, where I can’t feed myself, where I can’t care for the people around me, where other people have to move me around to keep me from having bedsores, I would then submit, ‘Is that really living?’

This isn’t a public health bill, it’s a death before disability bill.

So this is what some of you are planning to vote for. You are not protecting DC residents from agonizing pain. You are promoting the particular views of one specific group of people, described by Obamacare architect Ezekiel Emanuel as predominantly “white, well-insured, and college-educated.” People who are used to being in control of every aspect of their lives.

So, like so much in the US, assisted suicide is an issue that cuts across class and race. The 2012 election map in Massachusetts shows that wealthier, whiter areas voted heavily for legalization, while working-class whites and people of color voted strongly against. People turning out for Barack Obama and current Sen. Elizabeth Warren defeated the proposal.

The second article, from October 17, by reporter of color Fenit Nirappil, was titled “Right-to-die law faces skepticism in nation’s capital: ‘it’s really aimed at old black people.’” It details the opposition to assisted suicide of Washington’s black majority.

Many in the black community distrust the health-care system and fear that racism in life will translate into discrimination in death, said Patricia King, a Georgetown Law School professor who has written about the racial dynamics of assisted death.

“Historically, African Americans have not had a lot of control over their bodies, and I don’t think offering them assisted suicide is going to make them feel more autonomous,” King said.

District residents told Nirappil of concerns that “low-income black senior citizens may be steered to an early death”, and that in the end, assisted suicide is really all about reducing government healthcare costs.

Derek Humphry, who founded the Hemlock Society (Compassion & Choices’ original name), wrote years ago of the “unspoken argument,” that assisted suicide will gain traction because of “the realities of the increasing cost of health care in an aging society, because in the final analysis, economics, not the quest for broadened individual liberties or increased autonomy, will drive assisted suicide to the plateau of acceptable practice.”

Assisted suicide, like suicide in general, is primarily practiced and promoted by white people. Nirappil reported that national leaders in the assisted suicide movement are all white, and that most of the participants at a recent rally were white. In the 18 year history of the Oregon assisted suicide law, only one black person has used the program. In a state that is now 22% nonwhite, 97% of assisted suicide deaths have been white.

Non-Hispanic whites also commit regular suicide at a rate 2.5 times that of blacks. Rather than importing a predominantly-white practice as a solution for the district, you must say no to this bill and the big lie it hides behind. Assisted suicide is not about protecting suffering people from physical pain, it’s about satisfying the control needs of a group of people, predominantly white, who would rather die than become dependent on another human being.

Please respect your constituents, understand the danger this bill represents, and reject this bill. Thank you.

Let’s have a big conversation on assisted suicide in Ireland – open, honest and balanced.

By Dr Kevin Fitzpatrick - Director of EPC - International and HOPE Ireland.

Dr Kevin Fitzpatrick

Brendan O’Connor has thought about Bernadette Forde’s death more deeply than most. (Ireland’s Sunday Independent May 3 2015), though his conclusions are still wrong.

Forde was failed, miserably. But not by the lack of a euthanasia/ assisted suicide law. That is still the wrong answer to the right questions.

For a ‘big conversation’ about the complex subject of euthanasia/assisted suicide to work, it must be open, honest and balanced at all turns, not just in rare articles by more intelligent journalists - who still go badly wrong.

O’Connor chose to reinforce the dreadful idea that ‘this, or any disabled life is not worth living’. The vast majority of people with multiple sclerosis do not commit suicide or even want to (never mind the rest of us disabled people). It is not just because Forde was battling multiple sclerosis that she fell into despair, enough to want to commit suicide. By all reports, she had no real nursing care let alone very good palliative care; and she was isolated from her family apart from one niece.

Disabled people are a minority amongst those who come to suicide. Tragically, it is mostly younger, non-disabled men who find themselves in what is surely the loneliest place on the planet. But when we can we try to help them, prevent the ultimate act of despair.

So again and again, why is our reaction to disabled people so different from when an otherwise ‘healthy’ person says ‘I am going to commit suicide’? The insidious notion that obviously a disabled life is not worth living is so, so dangerous and damaging. It is actually rank disability discrimination. And it is the other side of the terrible coin of treating disabled people as ‘useless mouths’. Look what cashing that coin led to in Germany. nd that is where the ‘big’ conversation needs to be honest.

Bernadette Forde deserved better. But the better she deserved was absent.

The rest of us, disabled people especially, also deserve better, but the easy acceptance that our disabled lives are not worth living is not it. Nor is the easy jump to the false notion that the only, right answer to suffering is to end the life of the sufferer, and to give all those involved legal immunity.

We all wish for the ‘velvet cushion death’ O’Connor describes - but we must not romanticise it. Not every relative gathered at every bedside is there out of pure love. Not everyone gets to have a home death – in our time, not even many do.

Dr Ira Byock

The ‘dying role’ is extremely important. I commend O’Connor for having read Ira Byock; would that more journalists took his lead. But our rituals are not merely some shallow attempt to comfort ourselves. The shallow idea is that we are more sophisticated in our time. That is the mistake Frazer famously made in the Golden Bough. Beware the ‘god’ of science. We do not become better people by developing more science. These rituals reflect something that can be described as the ‘majesty’ of death, its role in our lives. Today, we too often treat death as though it were like stepping off a bus. In a Kleenex generation everything is disposable.

To his credit, O’Connor speaks about some of these ‘higher-level’ concerns: how dying in our own clothes, at home, and done well, can be a profound and intimate death, for the loving living, maybe even for the person dying. That is where the majesty of death can lie.

Forde committed suicide. That she was left in such a state, where she came to believe suicide was her only option, is terrible. That is ‘our’ failure. Not that she should have committed suicide in a foreign death clinic at ten grand a pop, or that a law, endangering so many others to death should be absent.

Ira Byock: We should think twice about assisted suicide.

By Alex Schadenberg

Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Ira Byock

Dr Ira Byock, who directs the Institute for Human Caring of Providence Health & Services in Los Angeles, wrote an excellent article concerning assisted suicide that was published in the LA Times on January 30, 2015.

The timing of his article is critical with the California assisted suicide bill being debated and assisted suicide bills currently being debated in at least 15 US states.

Byock, who identifies with a politically progressive position explains how assisted suicide is not politically progressive.

As someone who supports all those other liberal causes, yet opposes physician-assisted suicide, I'd ask my fellow progressives to shine a cold hard light on this issue. We have been the target of a decades-long branding campaign that paints hastening death as an extension of personal freedoms. We should bring the same skepticism to physician-assisted suicide that we do to fracking and genetically modified food.

Byock continues by explaining how the assisted suicide lobby has created euphemisms to confuse the assisted suicide debate.

Assisted suicide laws are more dangerous than people acknowledge

This article was published by NewJersey.com on October 31, 2014

John Kelly

By John B Kelly - the New England regional director for Not Dead Yet, a grassroots disability group opposed to the legalization of assisted suicide.

The media is flush with the sympathetic story of Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old newlywed with aggressive brain cancer. Her video advocating expanded assisted suicide laws has been seen millions of times, prompting another push in the State Assembly to pass an assisted suicide bill.

When the focus is on an individual, assisted suicide can sound good – who’s against compassion or relieving suffering? But a closer look reveals that assisted suicide puts vulnerable people in mortal danger. The more people learn about the real-world implications of these bills, the more they oppose them. (Our group takes its name – Second Thoughts – from this fact). Last year, the Legislatures of New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut rejected assisted suicide bills.

The simple truth is that not all families are loving. Elder abuse is a nationally recognized epidemic. Every year, New Jersey elders suffer an estimated 175,000 cases of reported and unreported abuse, most by adult children and caregivers. Financial gain or emotional relief creates motives for steering someone toward death. The two witnesses to the death request could be an heir and the heir’s accomplice. Once the lethal prescription leaves the pharmacy, there is no further supervision and no independent witness required at the death to ensure that the lethal dose is self-administered.

Depressed people will be harmed. Under Oregon’s program, Michael Freeland obtained a lethal prescription for his terminal diagnosis, despite a 43-year history of severe depression, suicide attempts and paranoia. The prescribing doctor said a psychological consult was not “necessary.” When Freeland received volunteer suicide prevention services, he was able to reconcile with his estranged daughter and lived two years post-diagnosis. Oregon’s statistics for the last four years show that only 2 percent of patients are being referred for psychological evaluations.

Dr Ira Byock: Brittany Maynard is being exploited by Compassion & Choices, ... And I think that’s a tragedy.

By Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.

Ira Byock

In a debate format interview on the PBS Newhour, Ira Byock, a leading palliative care physician, author, and public advocate for improving care for the end of life debated Barbara Coombs Lee the leader of the assisted suicide lobby group Compassion & Choices.

Byock, with reference to the Brittany Maynard story stated on PBS Newshour that:

My heart goes out to Brittany Maynard. It’s a heart-wrenching story. But I want to assure ... people watching that she could get excellent whole person care and be assured of dying gently in her bed surrounded by her family. 

It’s ironic that we know how to give extremely good care, not only comprehensive medical care, but tender, loving care. But ... as the Institute of Medicine report shows, we’re just not doing it in this country. And it really is a national disgrace. 

And giving doctors now authority to write lethal prescriptions fixes really nothing, none of the deficiencies in practice or medical training. It’s really a socially dangerous thing to do.

Byock then examined the reality of legalized assisted suicide.

You know, Oregon’s law was modeled after Holland and Belgium. And in Holland and Belgium these days, people are being euthanized, by their own volition, for things like depression or ringing of the ears, not just pain. 

You know, Compassion & Choices actually sold to the public the legalization of physician-assisted suicide because of unremitting pain. But we can control pain. What’s happening now is that over 85 percent of people who use Oregon’s law and end their life do so because of existential or emotional suffering, feeling of being a burden to their families, feeling the loss of the ability to enjoy life, feeling the loss of meaning. 

Well, once those become criteria, there are a lot of problems and human suffering that then becomes open to assisted suicide and euthanasia. It’s an undeniable fact that the slippery slope exists.

Physician-assisted suicide is not a right. It’s a wrong.

Ira Byock

The following letter by Ira Byock was published in the New York Times on November 4, 2012.

Ben Mattlin (“Suicide by Choice? Not So Fast,” Op-Ed, Nov. 1) shows so well that people who are disabled or frail do not have to choose death to become dignified; they already are. 

My job as a physician is to ensure that people can see their inherent dignity reflected in they way they are cared for. 

The “right to die” is just a slogan. No right to suicide can be found in any social compact. 

People do have a right to expect that their doctors will be well trained in pain management, skilled in communication and in counseling them through the most difficult times in life. 

And we have a right to expect that Medicare and insurance companies will not force us to give up effective treatments for our medical conditions in order to receive hospice care for our comfort and our families’ support. 

Physician-assisted suicide is not a right. It’s a wrong. 

IRA BYOCK
College Station, Tex., Nov. 1, 2012 

The writer, the director of palliative care at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, is the author of “The Best Care Possible: A Physician’s Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life.”