Opposing assisted suicide after near-fatal motorcycle accident

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Bill Fertig

A guest column by Bill Fertig that was published in the Virginian Pilot on October 22 explains that a near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1999 has led to Fertig opposing assisted suicide. Fertig wrote:

My view of assisted suicide is colored by my near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1999. As I awoke from a medically induced coma, I soon realized that the accident had left me with complete paraplegia (T-7). Until then, I lay unconscious and oblivious in a trauma center. I briefly contemplated the emotional pull of life versus death. Fortunately, I had a strong and supportive extended family who helped me to choose hope to keep going. I still had to relearn everything about my new body and adjust to a manual wheelchair.

Before my injury, on multiple occasions as a police officer, I was assigned to stop a suicide. This also gave me insight. In one case, I was dispatched to the home of a man who had attempted to asphyxiate himself inside his running car and closed garage. Upon entry, I successfully pulled him away from the carbon monoxide and drew him safely outside. He had been depressed, but was lucky. After the intervention, he received mental health treatment and recovered.

I have also personally witnessed the devastating and long-lasting effects of suicide on a victim’s family and friends. Naturally, they wonder why the victim did not seek lifesaving mental health treatment, or during an advanced illness, palliative care and/or hospice.

In my experience, all medical professionals and first responders are routinely trained to save people from committing suicide. Why then, do we, as Americans, not make every effort to dissuade sick patients from taking their lives, and why do we instead euphemistically refer to the tragedy as “medical aid in dying”? Why do many people not call it what it is: suicide? As a society, we never encourage people to choose death by overdose, carbon monoxide or a self-inflicted gunshot. Why is assisted suicide mass-marketed as “medical aid” when it has nothing to do with improving a patient’s health?

In my second career with the Spinal Cord Injury Resource Center, I helped advocate for victims and families — including a Maine man living with chronic spinal cord injury (SCI). Hospital staff there projected their own personal bias onto Chris Dunn, a plumber in his 40s with a severe SCI from a swimming pool accident, who lay stabilized in a critical care unit. Hospital administrators prejudged Dunn as having slim prospects for quality of life and were prepared to let him die without rehabilitation efforts. Dunn expressed his will to live and requested every opportunity for rehabilitation. With our help, he lived, and once weaned from a ventilator during rehabilitation, returned home to live with his family.

Depression can be successfully treated. The effects of chronic injuries can be mitigated through quality rehabilitation. Taking time to consider all options can be a great healer. Even “irreversible medical decline” can be alleviated with palliative or hospice care.

As an SCI survivor, I know the healing power of patience. My goal is to help others see their tremendous value — regardless of circumstances — and ensure they can access the lifesaving treatment they deserve.

The insurance industry should never be allowed to prescribe assisted suicide as a cheap substitute for providing lifesaving care. If you agree that every patient should have access to lifesaving treatment, urge your legislators to oppose assisted suicide. For more information, contact NoSuicideVA@gmail.com or find us on Facebook.

Bill Fertig of Virginia Beach is the retired director of the Spinal Cord Injury Resource Center of the United Spinal Association. Prior to his motorcycle accident, he was a 25-year member of a Pennsylvania police department.

The assisted suicide lobby has introduced bills to legalize assisted suicide in Virginia.

Legalizing assisted suicide does not reduce murder-suicide.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

A commentary by Karen Chaffraix that was published in the Fauquier Times (Virginia) on November 10 infers that legalizing assisted suicide will somehow remedy the tragic acts of murder suicide. 

Chaffraix's commentary concerns the tragic deaths of Linda and Clark Johnson by murder-suicide. Chaffraix states that European studies suggest that people should have the right to end their own lives, in these situations. Chaffraix does not provide links to these "studies".

Research by Donna Cohen, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and a suicide researcher, and others prove that murder-suicide is rarely related to assisted suicide.

Donna Cohen

Cohen stated the following in a March 2009 Minnesota Tribune article:

When people read reports of a murder-suicide they will often ask the question, was this an Act of love, or desperation? Cohen who has researched this question tries to find answers. 

She stated in the article:

That notion is common in murder-suicides, said Cohen, who has testified before Congress, written extensively and helped train families and physicians. She is a professor of aging and mental health at the University of South Florida and heads its Violence and Injury Prevention Program. 

"If they were consulted, families usually would try to stop it,'' she said. "In fact, murder-suicide almost always is not an act of love. It's an act of desperation."

Cohen explains that murder-suicide does not equate with assisted suicide. She said:

Some people equate murder-suicide with assisted suicide and the right to control when you will die, Cohen said. "It usually is not the same. This is suicide and murder.''

According to Cohen, the typical murder-suicide case involves a depressed controlling husband who shoots his ill wife. "The wife does not want to die and is often shot in her sleep. If she was awake at the time, there are usually signs that she tried to defend herself." 

Murder-suicide are tragic actions, but legalizing assisted suicide will not reduce the incidence of murder-suicide.

Virginia legislative panel rejects assisted suicide.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

An article published November 8 in the Virginia Mercury by Katie O'Connor, informs us that a Virginia legislative committee rejected a legislative proposal to legalize assisted suicide. The article reported:

Del. Kaye Kory, D-Fairfax, requested that the Joint Commission on Health Care study the medical-aid-in-dying debate, in which a patient with less than six months to live obtains lethal drugs through a physician to end his or her life. 

The commission’s staff developed several options, including a few related to adding a new end-of-life decision-making tool to Virginia’s code, called the “Physicians Orders for Scope of Treatment,” or POST, form. 

It would encourage patients to decide on their treatment preferences with their doctors, and it would then be added to their medical record or a state registry so everyone from first responders to emergency physicians knows the patient’s preferences. 

But all the options were killed, with all the committee’s Republicans, as well as Sen. Rosalyn Dance, D-Petersburg, voting not to make any recommendations on the topic.

The article confirmed that Kory will not be introducing legislation to legalize assisted suicide in Virginia this year.

Virginia will be the first of many states to reject assisted suicide during this legislative cycle.

NDY & ADAPT Submit Public Comments To Virginia Commission Opposing Potential Assisted Suicide Legislation

The Virginia Joint Commission on Health Care has requested public comments by close of business on October 15 concerning several policy issues, including one option that would recommend the introduction of assisted suicide legislation. It’s called Policy Option 2, worded as follows:

Introduce legislation to amend the Code of Virginia to include a Medical Aid-in-Dying statute that mirrors California’s EOLOA statute, with the following additions: a. when informing patient of alternative to MAID, attending physician must include information about any possible treatments for the underlying disease, b. attending physician must attest that patient enrolled in hospice or was informed of EOL services, c. if patient is in nursing facility, one witness may be person designated by facility, d. adopt rules to facilitate collection of information regarding compliance, e. provide an online guidebook and establish training opportunities for medical community to learn about the MAID process and medications that may be used (NOTE: Language will be provided to members and placed on the JCHC website 5 business days prior to the November Decision Matrix meeting).

O n October 11, NDY President Diane Coleman submitted a comment (to jchcpubliccomments@jchc.virginia.gov) which began:

Diane Coleman

I am submitting this comment as a person with an advanced neuromuscular condition who uses breathing support 18-19 hours a day. I have personal experience with misdiagnosis and the uncertainty of terminal predictions by doctors. I am also the founder and President of Not Dead Yet, a national disability rights group, with members in Virginia, that opposes legalization of assisted suicide because it is discriminatory and poses unacceptable dangers to elders and people with disabilities with or without terminal diagnoses.

This comment uses the term “assisted suicide” for several reasons. Merriam Webster defines suicide as “The act or an instance of taking one’s own life voluntarily and intentionally.” As the AMA Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs stated in its report on the issue this year, “The terms ‘aid in dying’ or ‘death with dignity’ could be used to describe euthanasia or palliative/hospice care at the end of life and this degree of ambiguity is unacceptable for providing ethical guidance.”[i] Assisted suicide proponents understandably prefer to call it “aid in dying” because it polls better. They attempt to justify the name change by asserting that the person is already dying. While some may be dying, others are not. More importantly, with assisted suicide, the cause of death is not a disease, but a lethal overdose.

My Personal Story of Mistaken Prognosis . . .

To continue reading the NDY comment, go here.

On October 12, Bruce Darling submitted a comment on behalf of ADAPT which stated:

Bruce Darling

As an organization working to ensure disabled people’s right to build our lives in the community, legislation making it legal for physicians to help end our lives is deeply troubling to ADAPT. While the proponents of this legislation will tell you that it is not about disabled people, only people with terminal illness, let me assure you that every single person who qualifies under that definition is a disabled person. Not every person with a disability is terminally ill, but every person who is terminally ill is or will eventually become a person with a disability. There is no person with a terminal prognosis who does not also have, or acquire, an impairment which significantly affects their ability to perform a major life function (such as eating, sleeping, toileting, or walking).

Accordingly, physician assisted suicide is only provided to people with disabilities, by definition. This is discrimination. People with disabilities have fought hard for the right to live as equals, to live and receive services in the community, to have equal access to housing and transportation and employment opportunities. In an ableist society, these rights are continually denied to us. Yet this same society wishes to extend to us the “right” to end our lives. Equal rights, means equal access to suicide prevention, not the false “compassion” of suicide assistance.

… Assisted suicide is not about relieving the suffering of the dying: it is an expression of the most toxic and deadly form of ableism, which holds that life with a disability is not worth living. The lives of people with disabilities, whether terminal or non-terminal, do matter, and are worth living. (Emphasis added.)  

To continue reading the ADAPT comment, go here.

If you would like to submit your own comment by October 15 at close of business (even just saying that you oppose Option 2), and/or support NDY’s and ADAPT’s comments, please email jchcpubliccomments@jchc.virginia.gov.

[i] REPORT OF THE COUNCIL ON ETHICAL AND JUDICIAL AFFAIRS 5-A-18, Page 2, https://www.ama-assn.org/sites/default/files/media-browser/public/hod/a18-ceja5.pdf

Virginia Medical Aid in Dying report may open the door to euthanasia.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

The Virginia Joint Commission on Health Care released its Interim Report (August 22) which appears to promote the legalizing of assisted suicide.

The Commission report's use of language is particularly concerning.

The report uses the term: Medical Aid in Dying. This language is used by the pro-euthanasia lobby to promote euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Canada legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide in June 2016 under the term Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD). In Canada MAiD refers to causing death by lethal injection (euthanasia) and lethal prescription (assisted suicide).

The definition of MAiD in the Commission report includes euthanasia.

The committee defined MAiD as:

• The ability of a patient to obtain a medication to end their life if they are competent, terminally ill, and over 18 years of age.
• The ability of a physician to prescribe a medication that will allow a competent, terminally ill individual over the age of 18 to end their life 
• Some individuals/organizations prefer to use terms like assisted suicide.
• However, different legal definition with implications if worded as such in Virginia statute.

The ability of a patient to obtain a medication to end their life does not limit the
act to assisted suicide. Obtaining a medication to end life can by done with a prescription for lethal drugs and an injection (euthanasia) of lethal drugs.

Medical Aid in Dying has also been interpreted to include palliative care. When euthanasia and/or assisted suicide is legalized under the term - MAiD it threatens good palliative care.

The study does not examine how the interpretation of language has expanded Oregon's assisted suicide act to people who are not terminally ill.

Communication between Craig New, analyst for the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) and Fabian Stahle, a Swedish researcher confirmed that the Oregon assisted suicide law is interpreted to include people who only become terminally ill if they refuse effective treatment, even when that treatment may cure the patient. Even a diabetic would qualify for assisted suicide in Oregon, if that person refuses insulin.

The study does not examine how assisted suicide laws are to cover-up any potential abuse. Assisted suicide laws enable the doctor who writes the lethal prescription to also be one of the doctors who approve the prescription and is also the doctor who is required to submit the assisted suicide report to the State Health Authority. This "self-reporting" system guarantee's that no abuse of the law will be found.

Virginians need to challenge the Joint Commission on Healthcare report before euthanasia and assisted suicide, under the guise of Medical Aid in Dying is imposed on Virginians.