Outgoing Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin’s Father’s Death was an Assisted Suicide

This article was published by True Dignity Vermont on January 6, 2017.

Peter Shumlin, the outgoing governor of Vermont, fought hard to legalize assisted suicide in the state; so it was no surprise when he listed it among other “accomplishments” in his farewell speech this week. A big surprise, however, came when the governor revealed that his own father died from assisted suicide. (Link to Youtube video) comments begin at minute 54:50.

Bristling with pride, Shumlin said that never in his wildest dreams did he imagine that his own father would die in this way. In May of 2011, however, True Dignity commented on a speech he made at a VT showing of the film “How to Die in Oregon”. The speech can be viewed at (Link to youtube video) comments begin at Minute 1:40. Speaking about how much he hoped VT would enact legal assisted suicide, he actually used his parents as illustrations of why he felt legalization was important.

Here, in italics are our comments at the time:

We were offended by the governor’s filmed jokes about how his apparently healthy but aged parents haven’t responded as he would have liked to his attempts to have “the conversation” to plan for their dying (in the video the audience laughs when he says he asked where they planned to be in ten years). 

… We need….to fight against the seduction of his not so soothing words about how Vermonters “take care of each other”, when he speaks words like these in the context of a conversation about assisted suicide.

In 2017 we are even more offended than we were in 2011. It is hard to believe that any governor would brag about facilitating a single suicide in his state. It is even harder to hear that governor brag about facilitating the suicide of his own parent.

Back in 2011, we were sorry for and feared for Peter Shumlin’s parents. It is self-evident to us that any suggestion that suicide is a viable end of life option for another person is itself pressure and can never be anything else If we heard the words Shumlin spoke in 2011 from one of our adult children, we would feel pressured, and we would not forget. No act done under pressure, even the most well-meaning pressure, is ever completely free.

We hope one day to live again in a state in which the sick and elderly are legally protected from such pressure, however well-meaning or inadvertent. Our new governor, Phil Scott, voted against legal assisted suicide when it was passed in 2013. Let’s ask him to work for its repeal now. Contact information will follow in the coming weeks.

Military Veterans Threatened by Assisted Suicide.

This article was published by True Dignity Vermont on May 14, 2016.

Rep Al Baldasaro

Representative Al Baldasaro of the New Hampshire Legislature on gave an impassioned speech on May 11 against a proposed “study committee” to look at “end of life choices.” Speaking on behalf of Veterans’ PTSD/TBI Commission, he cited the fact that New Hampshire is facing an epidemic of suicides among Veterans, and said: 

“What message are you sending to the community out there and all the good work every one of us has done to protect people from killing themselves? Now we want to make it easy?”

He said that opening the door to such a practice would have grave consequences for veterans at risk for suicide, and that even studying such a bill would threaten efforts to help veterans. He clearly states that euphemisms such as “aid in dying” don’t change the fact that such laws promote suicide and threaten efforts to protect people from killing themselves.

Why on Earth is Anyone Surprised By the Rise in US Suicides? Advertising Works.

This article was published by True Dignity Vermont on April 22, 2016.

News sources are reporting with surprise and seeming alarm on the Center for Disease Control’s newly released statistics showing that deaths by suicide in the entire US are on the rise. Why the surprise? It has been common knowledge since the rise of mass media, and even before, that advertising works.

True Dignity has neither the expertise nor the time to analyze the CDC report’s statistics in detail. A few quotes will suffice to paint the picture of our current situation.

“The suicide rate in the United States increased by 24% from 1999 through 2014…among all groups. The increase in suicide rate has been steady since 1999, before which there was a consistent decline since 1986…” (USA Today, April 22, 2016).

The USA Today article speculates (which is all anybody can do) that the rise is linked to a poor economy. We at True Dignity cannot fail to note that the rise began just as the economic boom of the 1990s was beginning to wind down, and continued through the fairly affluent 2000s, admittedly rising at a higher rate beginning in 2006, on the brink of the Great Recession. (Center for Disease Control and Prevention)

Though the economy may well have contributed to this rise, True Dignity calls everyone’s attention to a fact that is being ignored. 1998 was the year in which Oregon became the first state in the nation to put legalized assisted suicide into practice. This happened after a furious and widely publicized public argument between pro-assisted suicide forces and those opposing it, an argument waged in the courts and eventually decided by the US Supreme Court, which allowed it in Oregon but declined to make it a right nationally. 1999 was the first year for which the state of Oregon issued its annual report on its assisted suicide deaths. Ironically, this supposedly neutral government report called assisted suicide by the attractive name given to the law that made it legal: Death with Dignity.

The World Health Organization has warned the media that: 1) “Language that misinforms the public about suicide or normalizes it should be avoided”, and that the media should 2) “Avoid prominent placement and undue repetition of stories about suicide.” Yet, beginning in the period leading up to the implementation of the Oregon law and reaching a climax with Brittany Maynard’s picture on the cover of People, there has been relentless media promotion of suicide, relentless misinformation about laws that allow medical professionals to facilitate deaths of people who could have lived years and that contain virtually no protections against euthanasia or even murder of a person who, believing him or herself to be terminally ill, has obtained a lethal prescription. We have detailed the ways in which the laws allow this to happen so many times that we won’t repeat ourselves here, only urge you to search our topic list.

Bottom line: Compassion and Choices has engaged in an ad campaign, both paid and freely given by the media, and it has been effective. The only thing that should surprise us about the rise in suicide deaths is that it has not been even bigger. We hope that the efforts of many individuals and groups, including ours, have, by calling suicide exactly what the World Health organization has urged the media to call it, “a public health problem”, contributed to that fact, the only silver lining to a terrible cloud hanging over our nation and the world.

Will we be able to hold the line? California has been the only US state to [pass] assisted suicide legislation since the Maynard campaign, but legalization is a threat in multiple states. Canada’s highest court has ruled that assisted suicide is a right, and has ordered Parliament to write laws to regulate it.

"Not everyone has family members to protect them."

Dear Assemblymembers:

My husband and I recently moved from Vermont because we fear growing old in a state with legal assisted suicide.

Vermont offers a case study of assisted suicide’s effects. True Dignity Vermont, an advocacy group working for repeal of assisted suicide, recently reported that nursing home staff had approached a healthy 90 year old, in the home for rehab after a fall, to tell her about her “right” to assisted suicide. Her adult daughter noticed that her mother was upset and uncomfortable, but only found out what had happened after her mother was moved to another facility, where she went to pieces when the staff innocently tried to talk to her about her end of life wishes.

My husband and I envy the 90 year old her supportive family, which got her out of a situation in which she felt traumatizing pressure. Not everyone has family members to protect them. For us and many others, legal assisted suicide is a mortal danger.

With the exception of Vermont, legislators in every state, after hearing the evidence, have refused to legalize assisted suicide.

We urge you to do the same.

Sincerely,
Carolyn and Gerald McMurray
Long Beach,

Assisted Suicide and the Patient - Physician Relationship.

This article was published on the Repeal Act 39 website.

Dr Robert Emmons

By Dr Robert S Emmons

I am a psychiatrist with twenty-five years of experience in private practice. I hold the rank of Part-Time Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Vermont College of Medicine, where for many years, I taught the practice of ethics and psychoanalytic psychotherapy to residents and medical students. I am a past chair of the Ethics Committee of the Vermont District Branch of the American Psychiatric Association.

I am not here to tell my neighbors how to live or end their lives, nor am I here to tell my colleagues how to practice. Rather, I am here to inform you about the clinical problems that are created as the State of Vermont gets involved.

The Code of Ethics of the American Medical Association prohibits physician involvement in prescribing or advising on lethal prescriptions or any other form of patient suicide: “Physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer.” I do not belong to the AMA, but I do subscribe to this principle of ethics. My code of ethics does not compel me to interfere in any way with the choices of others about how their lives may end; my code of ethics applies only to my own actions as a physician. I am not here to tell my neighbors how to live or end their lives, nor am I here to tell my colleagues how to practice. Rather, I am here to inform you about the clinical problems that are created as the State of Vermont gets involved simultaneously in the patient-physician relationship in two key areas: end of life care and the rationing of medical care.

Under Act 39, patients in Vermont can have access to lethal prescriptions, as long as they and their doctors follow a complicated protocol prescribed and legally enforced by the state. The protocol contains artificial timelines and clinically superfluous documentation requirements that are much less about patient welfare and much more about conferring legitimacy on a process that is banned by the profession. The end of life, with all its complexity and subtlety, is one place where a one size fits all approach is especially contraindicated. By spelling out such a detailed protocol, the state takes ownership of the process away from patients and their doctors. When patients and doctors get preoccupied with following externally imposed rules, they lose track of their own reasoning processes and clinical intuitions, the quality of clinical decision-making suffers, and we have less confidence that patient values are truly being served.

When patients and doctors get preoccupied with following externally imposed rules, they lose track of their own reasoning processes.

Facts on the ground prove a slippery slope is here.

Published by True Dignity Vermont on November 24, 2014

“You don’t see people marching in the street demanding the right to be killed by a doctor,” Attorney and Award winning Author Wesley J. Smith told a packed conference room at Saturday’s East Coast Conference Against Assisted Suicide in Hartford, Conn., coordinated by the Family Institute of Connecticut and the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.

“Suicide pushers are a small group. We look like America, they don’t,” Smith emphasized.

T

Wesley Smith

he “we” to whom Smith referred, are essentially anyone for whom legally sanctioned, assisted suicide poses a very real risk. The elderly, the frail, the mentally ill, those who face serious illness or disability of any kind– all eventually may be judged as “better off dead” in a culture where the solution to suffering is to kill the sufferer, Smith told the audience.

“We’re not talking about a theoretical slippery slope, we’re talking facts on the ground,” he said.

Yet, despite their small numbers, the persistent efforts of the “suicide pushers” to pass legislation to allow doctors to help patients kill themselves have begun to change the national consciousness about suffering and perhaps more significantly, about those who suffer. The exploitation in recent weeks of Brittany Maynard by Compassion and Choices, formerly the Hemlock Society, has catapulted the topic into the headlines and onto social media, putting a sympathetic, but deceptive face on the realities of legalized assisted suicide.

Assisted suicide often involves pain and suffering.

This article was published by the Providence Journal on October 17, 2014.

By Lani Candelora

Did you know that many assisted suicides experience complications? Assisted suicide is wrongly marketed to the public as a flawless, peaceful escape from suffering. It can be a painful and scary death. It can include gasping, muscle spasms, nausea, vomiting, panic, confusion, failure to produce unconsciousness, waking from unconsciousness and a failure to cause death.

Just recently, we saw a heartbreaking article about a woman named Brittany Maynard who has planned her assisted-suicide death for Nov. 1. She is clearly terrified of a hard and painful death, and has been led to believe that assisted suicide is the best way out. However, Compassion and Choices, the leading advocates of assisted suicide, cannot guarantee her the easy death they advertise.

The most comprehensive study on clinical problems with assisted suicide (published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Feb. 12, 2000) was conducted over a six-year period in the Netherlands, where assisted suicide has been legal for many years. It found that over 18 percent of assisted suicides experienced problems severe enough to cause a doctor to step in and euthanize the patient. In at least 14 percent of assisted suicides the patient had problems with completion including waking up from coma, not becoming comatose, and not dying after becoming comatose. Another 7 percent of assisted suicides reported muscle spasms, extreme gasping for air, nausea and vomiting.

The New England Journal of Medicine study insightfully mentions that all reporting doctors are practitioners and supporters of assisted suicide and euthanasia who are less likely to report unfavorable data. They “may have underestimated the number and seriousness of problems,” causing complications to be under reported to an unknown degree.

Vermont Assisted Suicide Law: One year later ...

The following report was published by True Dignity Vermont on May 20, 2014.

A year ago today, at the bill signing party for Act 39 held in the Governor’s ceremonial office, True Dignity Vermont launched a hotline and email address for individuals who suspect that a patient was being unduly influenced to request or ingest lethal drugs, or were being given such drugs against their will. That number is: 1-855-787-5455 or 1-855-STP-KILL, and ReportAbuse@TrueDignityVt.org.

“We expanded our educational role to become a place where our network of health care providers and other supporters would have a place to take their concerns,” stated True Dignity spokesperson, Carolyn McMurray of Bennington. “The most alarming reports we have received to date involve two separate clinical psychologists, dealing with two different patients, both of whom had suicidal tendencies. In each case, the patients revealed their belief that suicide was more ‘acceptable’ now that the legislature had passed this law.”

Shortly after Act 39 went into effect, True Dignity Vermont received a call from a woman convinced that a health care facility was intentionally withholding treatment from her elderly mother. TDVT recommended that she contact the appropriate experts for further investigation.

Nearly six weeks ago, True Dignity Vermont received a call from an 85 year-old Korean War veteran from New Jersey who wanted information about how he could come here and get a “shot” to end his life. During the conversation, he revealed that he was not terminally-ill, nor physically ill in anyway. He said he was depressed, and he said the suffering of depression was terrible. The man believed, with all his heart, that the new law meant that he could come to Vermont and a physician would end his life. True Dignity Representative told him we did not want him to commit suicide and talked to him for as long as he wanted to talk. He said it helped him a lot to talk. The representative told him to get professional help and invited him to call back to talk whenever he wished. He has not called back.

Celebration Dinner - May 30 - Nashua New Hampshire

John Kelly

Nancy Elliott has organized a Victory Celebration Dinner on Friday, May 30 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Nashua New Hamphsire to celebrate the overwhelming defeat of assisted suicide in NH. The celebration extends to other New England states, including: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, Vermont, Maine, Rhode Island and Quebec. 

John Kelly the New England regional director for Not Dead Yet, will be the dinner speaker. The cost for the dinner is $35.

There will be a leaders meeting in the afternoon of May 30. 

For more information contact Alex Schadenberg.

Book a room at the Crowne Plaza Hotel for $119 under the name "Euthanasia Prevention Coalition" by calling: 1-603-886-1200.

Payment to (Euthanasia Prevention Coalition) Box 611309 Port Huron MI 48061-1309.

Contact Alex Schadenberg at: 1-877-439-3348 or info@epcc.ca
or contact Nancy Elliott at: mmknhrep@gmail.com

Vermont Group working to repeal Assisted Suicide Act.

By Alex Schadenberg

The Vermont Alliance for Ethical Healthcare have launched a TV advertising campaign in a first step to repealing the Vermont Assisted Suicide Act that was signed into law on May 20. True Dignity Vermont is also supporting the campaign.

Link to the TV Ad.

An article in the Burlington Free Press quotes Edward Mahoney, the President of the Vermont Alliance as stating:

“Our goal is to raise awareness about the legislation,” “Our Legislature just passed a bad law. Repeal this bad law.”

The Vermont Assisted Suicide bill (S-77) failed to pass in the Senate. Governor Peter Shumlin, a long-time assisted suicide promoter and who had received campaign donations from the assisted suicide lobby, had promised to legalize assisted suicide, and therefore pushed a second-time to get S-77 through the Senate.

A last minute compromise gained Shumlin the needed votes leading to S-77 passing by a vote of 17 to 15 in the Senate.

Edward Mahoney

The Burlington Free Press article stated:

Mahoney calls the law “legislative malpractice” and notes numerous flaws, including that while the law requires a patient to be able to self-administer the medication when the prescription is written, there is nothing to ensure the patient is still able to do so when he or she takes it.

Washington State attorney, Margaret Dore called Vermont Bill S-77 irresponsible while I referred to S-77 as the worst assisted suicide bill ever.

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition encourages the Vermont Alliance for Ethical Healthcare to continue their campaign to Repeal the Bill. The legalization of assisted suicide threatens the lives of people at the most vulnerable time of their life. S-77 is the worst form of assisted suicide legislation in America.

Important links.
- Link to the TV Ad
- Vermont Assisted Suicide Law - Legislative Malpractice.
- True Dignity Vermont establishes watchdog helpline.

Physician-assisted Suicide Was More Important to Vermont Legislators Than the Wrongful and Tragic Loss of Innocent Human Life

Bob Orleck, sent the following article in italics below, to True Dignity Vermont. Orleck was in the Senate and House for every stage of the assisted suicide debate in Vermont and he knows exactly what happened.  As a pharmacist with detailed knowledge of how the suicide drugs work, Bob is appalled that this law was passed.

Pharmacist and Legislative Observer: Physician-assisted Suicide Was More Important to Vermont Legislators Than the Wrongful and Tragic Loss of Innocent Human Life.

By Bob Orleck, Pharmacist

A very accurate analysis of what Act 39 (physician assisted suicide) will mean in real life practice to real hurting people  was written by Edward J. Mahoney, Vermont Alliance for Ethical Health Care, and published in the 5 July edition of the Burlington Free Press. 

Bob Orleck

While Mr. Mahoney has pointed to many legislative errors, there will be more discovered as application of this law meets the multitude of fact situations and abuses that will present. What was clear from the beginning, even with consideration of the Oregon style bill before it morphed into what we got, was that Vermont’s legislature for political reasons refused to deliberate on the many dangerous facets of this legislation. They focused solely on appealing to special interests both in and out of our State of Vermont and ignored the good of the people. Their work is an embarrassment and needs to be fixed. To have a special session though, with the same cast of characters who walk in lock step, will probably prove fruitless. They were blind to the truth then and they will most likely chose to stay in the dark in the future. A special session though, driven by a realization that serious errors were made, might lead to a more sufficient vetting of the issues and a change in course for our lawmakers, one that realizes they went down the wrong path of being controlled by ignorance, politics and emotion instead of by sound medical  judgment, scientific facts and the best interests of Vermonters.

Our Vermont legislators in their last minute rush to salvage what appeared to be certain rejection of the Oregon styled Physician Assisted Suicide bill, made a deal with an ego driven lawmaker to get some manner of death legislation. In so doing they threw caution to the wind, carelessly drafted language, then failed to do critical examination of their work and instead cranked up the emotion level and crammed it though with pressure from Governor Shumlin and by the recognized hard work of Speaker Shap Smith, who maneuvered and controlled the House debate to gain passage of the bill in his chamber. This may well be the undoing of at least both of these politicians, who did not do their homework on this last minute compromise and who should pay the price by being turned out of office in the future for violating the trust they were given by the people not to do harm. In that they failed miserably and should be held accountable by the voters.

It was so hard to watch the actions of the legislature move toward the passage of physician assisted suicide when there was so much valid and scientific evidence available and presented that was ignored. I could not understand this until True Dignity Vermont made the point that cleared up the whole matter for me. Casualties were acceptable! As simple as that! That is why the legislators ignored the doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, nurses and ethicists. They knew from the beginning exactly what they were doing and what the cost of doing it would be, and there was no way they were going to allow facts to stand in the way.

Throughout the debate on this bad law, Act 39, it was amazing how easily the majority of Vermont lawmakers accepted the fiction that physicians can accurately predict the amount of life left in a person. Medicare and hospice require that a patient, to be eligible for coverage, must have a terminal illness with a prognosis of six months or less to live if their condition is allowed to run its natural course. It was never intended that this physician’s prognosis be the basis for making a person eligible for a procedure to make that death happen before the six months. So many times these predictions are wrong and the patient lives much longer. In fact under the care provided by hospice their life can and is often prolonged beyond what it would otherwise have been before the six month prediction. This was not meant to be a pronouncement to trigger a life ending procedure but one to provide care to a person who is dying and needs support. But the death proponents had to have a test so they latched on to these often used but scientifically lacking guesses that physicians are called upon to make. For widespread acceptability of physician assisted suicide the proponents had to limit the application to those patients who appeared to be facing imminent death. Without such, they would have failed. But what is troubling to my thinking is that I believe they knew quite well that the test was flawed but were willing to accept that because they had to win at any cost.

I am a pharmacist, and so many times I tried to point out to the lawmakers that there were dangers in the dosing procedure that was to be used to bring about the death and that those dangers would result in botched attempts, horrific side effects and even exacerbation of already painful situations for a large percentage of dying patients. In some cases the patient would not even die from the procedure but would surely suffer greatly. I asked our legislators to address the objective facts supporting my opinion but could not get them to even respond other than to say they thought the bill had safeguards and was a good bill. They had to avoid this evidence just as they accepted the fictional certainty of a six month physician prognosis in order to get their death bill passed. They had to realize there would be casualties along the way but that would be acceptable in order to accomplish their death on demand objective. They wanted this death law and considered the price affordable. For these folks, physician assisted suicide was more important to them than the wrongful and tragic loss of an innocent human life. But now it appears that in their zeal to get the job done, they carelessly and negligently created a monster that will keep raising its ugly head and doing more damage than even they had expected and that might just cost them their position of power.

True Dignity Vermont establishes watchdog hotline to protect Vermont citizens from assisted suicide.

Watchdog Group Launches Hotline

True Dignity Vermont has launched an abuse hotline in response to the recently-passed bill that will allow Vermont physicians to prescribe lethal drugs  to terminally ill patients.

Individuals who suspect patients of being unduly influenced to request or ingest lethal drugs, or of being given such drugs against their will, can report such concerns by calling: 1-855-787-5455 (1-855-STP-KILL) or emailing True Dignity Vermont at:  ReportAbuse@TrueDignityVt.org.

A citizen-led, grassroots initiative, True Dignity Vermont worked alongside other organizations to vigorously oppose the legalization of prescription death in Vermont. That effort failed with the passage of an amended bill on May 13, but leaders say they will press forward to work to protect vulnerable Vermonters who will be at risk as a result of what they call “dangerous, poorly conceived legislation.”

“We believe our role must now expand to that of watchdog, as well as providing education and a resource clearinghouse for Vermonters who want to be sure they will be protected from coercion to end their lives,” according to True Dignity spokesperson Carolyn McMurray of Bennington. 

“The bill that Governor Shumlin is signing into law is fraught with problems that will leave vulnerable patients open to abuse, and will damage patient-doctor trust,” she said,  adding that True Dignity Vermont plans to develop a registry of “safe” doctors, nursing homes and other health care providers who will not participate in assisted suicide. 

“Vermonters need to be reassured that the end of life need not be frightening and painful, and that they will be supported properly with the very best palliative care and pain control. Enabling suicide is not a compassionate response to suffering.”

More information about True Dignity Vermont is available at: http://truedignityvt.org/

A Vermont doctor asks her Senator to vote against Bill S 77, the Vermont assisted suicide bill.

Below in italics, is the excellent letter of a Bennington County Vermont physician, Carol Salazar, to Senator, Bob Hartwell. 

This letter was printed, with permission  on the True Dignity Vermont site under the title: A physicians letter to an undecided Senator.

Dear Senator Hartwell:

I am sorry to hear that you are undecided about the issue of physician assisted suicide. I hope I have misunderstood this.

Dr Carol Salazar.

I have been a practicing general internist for 30 plus years. I have practiced in NY State, Washington State, Idaho, Massachusetts and now in Vermont. I work extensively with the geriatric population, both in the long term care setting and the outpatient setting and in palliative care. I worked on the lower east side of Manhattan at the height of the AIDS epidemic, when young men and women were dying every day of terrible illnesses that we were just learning about. I recently walked with my 40 year old cousin (with 5 young children) and her family through the last 4-5 months of her fight with metastatic cancer. To the very end, her life was a gift to them and all of us . My husband’s best man died of AIDS not long after our wedding. They each chose to live and die with dignity, not by suicide. Life is not clean and tidy, as we all know. Why do we think the dying process should be – after all it is part of life and one of the only certainties in life.

I studied the Oregon public health records. The data is incomplete. The reason for choosing physician assisted suicide was very rarely for pain and suffering. Much of the media and persuasive arguments in favor of PAS focus on the relief of pain and suffering. Why? …Because we can all agree that relief of pain and suffering at the end of life is a goal, but to consider suicide as a “treatment” is a manipulation of words and the meaning of healing. This is seen clearly because the death cannot be reported as a suicide – therefore, technically, we as physicians are falsifying death certificates. How do we then insist that our children learn to be honest.

What message are we sending to our youth? Suicide rates are increasing in young adults. Every week we read about violent attacks on vulnerable groups. Our youth look to us for what we do, not what we say. Where can a teenager who is being bullied, suffering from an eating disorder or depression, find hope, when her state senators and representatives have stated that it is legal for a person to end their life at the moment of their own choosing. (as long as they have a terminal illness). Every physician knows how inaccurate the estimation of a six month survival can be.

How does a state that vigorously opposes the death penalty make a statement that suicide is a part of the palliative care package. We are fooling ourselves if we do not accept that down the road, as the finances and resources get tighter, the pressure will prevail to extend the “right to suicide” to wider populations. Legalizing physician assisted suicide is a dangerous step for our state, country and world. We are all at our most vulnerable when we suffer, and we all suffer – it is part of our humanity. To say there is no “slippery slope “ is just wrong.

Sincerely, and with hope,
Carol Salazar MD

True Dignity Vermont overwhelms opposition at Senate committee hearing.

The following message is from True Dignity Vermont about the recent hearing on assisted suicide in Vermont.

Opponents of assisted suicide hugely outnumbered proponents at tonight's public hearing before the Vermont Senate Judiciary and Health and Welfare committees. 

Three board members of True dignity got two minutes each to speak, as did many other opponents. The common theme was that legalizing assisted suicide would have unintended consequences such as suicide contagion, elder abuse, the perception by sick people of a duty to die, expansion to euthanasia, expansion to the non terminally ill and the incompetent, and a fundamental and corrupting change in the way both patients and doctors view the practice of medicine.

The proponents did not even try to respond to these concerns. Some actually reinforced them by saying things such as "If I were facing Alzheimer's I would want to have the option of death with dignity.". This is either ignorance or a dead giveaway that the proponents will push for the expansion of assisted suicide to people who are either more than six months from death or incompetent, since that expansion would be necessary to include Alzheimer's patients, who become incompetent earlier than six months before death.

Peter Shumlin, the governor of Vermont, has been pushing for the legalization of assisted suicide throughout his political career. Vermont has faced continuous attempts to legalize assisted suicide over the past several years.

For more information go to: Vermont Governor commits to legalizing assisted suicide, again. 

Vermont Governor commits to legalizing assisted suicide, again.

Vermont Governor, Peter Shumlin, has stated, once again, that Vermont will legalize assisted suicide in the 2013 legislative session.

Shumlin, who is a long-time supporter of assisted suicide and received money from the assisted suicide lobby during his 2010 leadership campaign, stated in 2011 and 2012 that the Vermont legislature would legalize assisted suicide and both attempts failed.

The Barre Montpelier Times Argus reported in an article published today by Peter Hirshfeld that:

From “death with dignity” to marijuana decriminalization, Gov. Peter Shumlin on Tuesday said he aims to seal the deal on several notable pieces of unfinished business from the last legislative biennium. 

Governor Peter Shumlin

“I’m confident that regardless of who leads the various bodies in the Legislature, that we can pass decriminalization of marijuana, death with dignity and the (unionization) bill for child care workers,” he said. “We’re going to get them done.”

Key lawmakers aren’t so sure. 

Sen. John Campbell, the Windsor County Democrat nominated to a second term as Senate president by his party colleagues Tuesday afternoon, was the Statehouse’s most prominent opponent of the child care unionization bill and legislation that would let terminally ill patients get a prescription that would end their lives. He said Tuesday his positions on those issues have not evolved in recent months, and that he’s not convinced either has the support needed to make it through the Legislature. 

Campbell, however, said he won’t try to squelch a vote on any end-of-life legislation. In fact, he said the topic in 2013 will receive more attention from Senate committees than it did in either of the last two sessions. 

“I recognize that this issue is not going to go away, and if the majority of people want to have a debate, then that debate should happen,” he said.  

Campbell said he envisions joint hearings of Senate committees on the judiciary and health and welfare. He said the hearings come in response to requests for additional debate from people on both sides of the issue. 

“If it passes, it passes. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t,” Campbell said. “But I think everyone involved in this conversation agrees there are issues that need to be vetted, so I think it’s worth taking the time to vet them.”

At the same time Vermont Public Radio reported that Shumlin is seeking to eliminate the deficit in 2013 through budget cuts and not tax increases. The report stated:

The Shumlin Administration is in the process of drafting its budget for next year and the Governor says he's asking all agencies and departments of state government to submit a level funded spending plan for policy makers to consider. 

Shumlin says the state once again faces a sizeable gap between available revenue and budget demands and he says the solution is not to increase any broad based taxes. 

"We've got some tough fiscal times that need to be dealt with once again," said Shumlin. "I was hoping that we wouldn't be back here dealing with another $50 million to $70 million budget deficit, we are, and I'm going to be presenting a budget that's going to ask the Legislature to once again balance the budget the old fashioned way by making tough spending choices not raising broad based taxes."

Shumlin will be required to reduce the budget through cuts to health care spending. Shumlin made a similar proposal in 2011 that included cuts to health care spending.

Sadly, many people believe that legalizing assisted suicide is a good idea rather than providing access to dignified care and medical support.

I predict that True Dignity Vermont will once again rally Vermont citizens to oppose the legalization of assisted suicide and the Vermont legislature will once again defeat the assisted suicide bill.

Jack Kevorkian comes to town

Thank you to True Dignity Vermont for posting this excellent article opposing assisted suicide by Boston Globe columnist Tom Keane. It was originally published in the Boston Globe on Auguest 26 and can be read online at: http://articles.boston.com/2012-08-26/opinion/33383823_1_suicide-jack-kevorkian-terminal-illness.

The article responds to the fact that Massachusetts citizens will be voting on an assisted suicide initiative in the November election.

True Dignity Vermont responded this way:

Deconstructing the Myth that Wealth Protects against the pressure to die by assisted suicide.

I was going through my past articles and I found this article that was posted by True Dignity Vermont entitled: Deconstructing the Myth that Wealth Protects against pressure to die by assisted suicide. True Dignity Vermont is a group of Vermont citizens who are opposed to assisted suicide. The following article is the full text of the original. Link to the original article.

By the Administrators

The August 13, 2012 edition of the New York Times contains a puff piece for assisted suicide that uses an anecdote about an Oregon physician to rehash the tattered argument that assisted suicide is safe because most of those who commit suicide where assistance is legal are affluent, insured, and well-educated. Because they could afford to pay for care, they are presumed not to be vulnerable to pressure.

Presumption is far from proof.

In an article published in November 2010 in the Journal of Medical Ethics, UK medical researchers I G Findlay and R. George go after the assumption that affluence equals invulnerability. That presumption, they write, sees “the concept of vulnerability from one perspective only”. They point out that many people, including some researchers, lack objectivity because “those who see a problem from within a set of values have difficulty imagining a view from elsewhere”. Findlay and George argue that it is entirely possible that the wealthy may in fact be more vulnerable than the poor to pressure to commit assisted suicide. The assumption that the poor are more vulnerable, they say, is based on a system of value judgments rather than solid research. An abstract and instructions for buying their article can be found at: http://jme.bmj.com/content/37/3/171.abstract. We will be glad to share our copy of the article with individuals on request.

Findlay and George list the following reasons why the affluent may be vulnerable:
1. “…illness and potential dependence are more frightening to them or because they have fewer psychosocial supports”
2. “ …they are people who are familiar with the intricacies of the law and can argue more persuasively with their physicians”
3. “… they may be vulnerable to factors invisible to rigid demographic analysis.”
4. “…stigmatization of illness and disability” may exist among the affluent.

Findlay and George also assert that the continued rise in the number of assisted suicide deaths in Oregon points to the need to investigate a possible role of “media coverage and possible contagion” and “subliminal unintended coercive influence from proponents of PAS….especially in consumerist societies in which citizens may be more sensitive to fashion and the new” and “to feel…that not to conform to the new way is in some manner politically incorrect”.

While Findlay and George don’t limit the possibility of this cultural coercion to the affluent, True Dignity, recognizing that we have our own set of values, believes that wealth creates its own set of pressures to die that come into play the moment assisted suicide is made legal anywhere.

Every Oregon annual report shows that most people dying under Oregon assisted law are over 60 (http://public.health.oregon.gov/ProviderPartnerResources/EvaluationResearch/DeathwithDignityAct/Documents/year14-tbl-1.pdf). It is a truism that elder abuse in this country is a huge problem and that much of the abuse is for financial gain. One has only to remember the abuse suffered by Brooke Astor, the NY socialite, widely reported a few years ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooke_Astor). If wealth did not protect her from being pressured to change her will or from its being changed without her knowledge, why would it have protected her from pressure or coercion to die sooner so that the same people who caused her to change the will could inherit her wealth sooner? Pressure and coercian are antithetical to choice. Attorney Margaret Dore calls assisted suicide “a recipe for elder abuse and the illusion of choice”; she provides much evidence to back up this assertion (http://www.margaretdore.com/vermont.cfm).

Barbara Wagner

We know with certainty that the poor have already been pressured under Oregon’s assisted suicide laws. Two terminally ill Oregon Medicaid patients, Barbara Wagner and Randy Stroup, received letters from the state’s Medicaid program denying coverage for life-prolonging chemotherapy prescribed by their doctors and wanted by them and, in the same letter, offering coverage of assisted suicide (http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=5517492&page=1#.UCkcpKOLU is, with Randy Stroup’s information on page 2). Stroup and Wagner perceived the letters as pressure to die, went public, and, in one case, got the decision overturned and in the other got free chemotherapy drugs from the company that made them. What we don’t know is how many patients received similar letters but did not go public and, whether they accepted the state’s offer of help in committing suicide or not, felt this pressure.

The doctor in the NY Times article (not linked here, but easy to find online) mouths the slogan of the national assisted suicide movement to the reporter: “…it is my life, it is my death, and it should be my choice.”

We say to him that what may (or may not) be his free choice may not be a free choice at all for another, whether that other is rich or poor, insured or not, educated or not. Our personal choices end where they threaten others.

Legal assisted suicide is and will always be a threat to some. We need to do everything possible to keep it from spreading in our country.

Massachusetts should follow the lead of Vermont by defeating assisted suicide Initiative

Massachusetts citizens will be voting on an Initiative to legalize assisted suicide on the November 2012 ballot. Opponents of the Initiative are urging the voters in Massachusetts to reject this proposal, in the same way as the Vermont legislature has consistently rejected attempts to legalize assisted suicide.

True Dignity Vermont, among others, has successfully defeated attempts to legalize assisted suicide in their state over and over again. This Spring the assisted suicide bill was defeated in the Vermont Senate Judiciary Committee and then it was re-introduced through the back-door linked to a Tanning Bed regulation bill resulting in it being defeated again by a vote of 18 to 11. In fact, legislation attempts to legalize assisted suicide have been introduced, debated and defeated on several occasions over the past few years in Vermont even though Governor Peter Shumlin has promised to legalize assisted suicide.

Kristian Mineau, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute stated to the Catholic News Service:

"We're obviously elated that the Senate in Vermont did the right thing, not only to defeat this onerous bill but also to defeat the political shenanigans that were going on to try to get this bill passed. The whole thing was politics at its worst,"

Second Thoughts

Polling indicates that it will be difficult to defeat the assisted suicide Initiative in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In March, Public Policy Polling released results that showed 43 percent of Massachusetts voters are in favor of assisted suicide, while 37 percent are opposed. The polling indicated that younger people were more likely to support assisted suicide.

Second Thoughts, a disability rights group that opposes assisted suicide, is organizing a strong campaign against assisted suicide in Massachusetts.

Second Thoughts is organizing a educational and organizational meeting on Saturday, May 19 from 2:00 - 4:30 pm at the Cambridge Senior Center in the main floor ballroom (806 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge MA).

The Second Thoughts website effectively explains why they oppose assisted suicide.