Victoria euthanasia Bill: "Offence to Induce Self-administration of a Voluntary Assisted Dying Substance" Is an Oxymoron and Unenforceable

This article was published by Choice is an Illusion on November 20, 2017

Oxymoron

By Margaret Dore, Esq., MBA

In the Victoria Australia euthanasia bill, Clause 86, contains the "offence to induce self-administration of a voluntary assisted dying substance." The Clause states:

A person must not, by dishonesty or undue influence, induce another person to self-administer a voluntary assisted dying substance in accordance with a self-administration permit.

This clause is too vague and uncertain to be enforced for the following reasons. 

The terms, "dishonesty" and "undue influence" are not defined in the bill. The clause, itself, is an oxymoron, i.e., a combination of contradictory and incongruous words ("dishonesty" or "undue influence" to induce another person to administer a "voluntary" substance "in accordance" with a "self-administration" permit). The offence is simply unenforceable.

It is assisted suicide not "medical aid in dying."

Alex Schadenberg
International Chair - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

The Colorado Secretary of State recently confirmed that enough signatures were collected for the assisted suicide question to be on the ballot.

The assisted suicide lobby is urging the media to replace the term assisted suicide with "Medical Aid in Dying." 

The term is assisted suicide is understood by the public and it is used by institutions such as the American Medical Association which states in its policy on Physician-Assisted Suicide that:

Physician-Assisted Suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physicians role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.

Brandon Rittiman from 9News published a clear report explaining: Why 9News uses the words assisted suicide. Rittiman states:

Supporters of that law have asked 9NEWS not to call it assisted "suicide." They'd rather we call it "medical aid in dying." 

What follows is our explanation of why we are not going to grant that request: 

First off, 9NEWS has no position on this ballot question. Nor do we take the issue lightly. 

We have a duty to tell you about it in simple, direct language. That’s why we’re not going to stop using the word “suicide.” 

Supporters of the measure argue the word “suicide” is too friendly to the opposition because it may make you think of someone who ends their life for no good reason. 

In contrast, the proposed law does require a reason: you’d need to be diagnosed with a terminal illness to get a life-ending prescription. 

But in plain English, that’s still “suicide.” 

Merriam-Webster defines suicide as:

“The act or an instance of taking one's own life voluntarily and intentionally especially by a person of years of discretion and of sound mind.”

The Oxford Dictionary puts it more simply:

“The action of killing oneself intentionally”

Dictionary.com goes with:

“The intentional taking of one's own life.”

All three definitions have something in common: they don’t depend in any way on the reason a person chooses to end their life, just that they do so on purpose. 

Supporters of this proposal want to change the dictionary definition of suicide. They might succeed one day. 

Changes in the law can end up changing our language. 

But it’s not our job in the news business to change the dictionary. 

It’s our job to use plain language that’s current and accurate-- and that’s what we’ll keep doing.

The New Mexico Supreme Court recently decided that "aid in dying" is assisted suicide, in a case where they decided that there is no right to assisted suicide in New Mexico.

Great News: The New Mexico Court of Appeals struck down an activist assisted suicide decision, upholding protections in law from assisted suicide.

Alex Schadenberg

By Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

The Washington Times reported yesterday that the New Mexico Court of Appeal overturned Nash's activist assisted suicide decision, to once again prohibit assisted suicide.

The New Mexico Court of Appeals handed a defeat to the right-to-die movement Tuesday by striking down a lower-court ruling establishing physician-assisted suicide.

The three-judge panel ruled 2-1 that the district court had erred when it determined that “aid in dying is a fundamental liberty interest.”

Protections from assisted suicide have been upheld in New Mexico.

On January 13, 2014; Judge Nan Nash, of the Second Judicial District in New Mexico made an activist decision in the case Morris v New Mexico. Nash legislated from the bench giving New Mexico doctors the right to prescribe lethal drugs to assist the suicide of their patients.

The case concerned Aja Riggs, a woman with uterine cancer, who said that she wanted to die by assisted suicide, and two doctors who were willing to prescribe lethal drugs.

The argument in the case was based on a word game.

The case argued that "aid in dying", which is also known as assisted suicide, is not prohibited by the New Mexico assisted suicide law because "aid in dying" is not assisted suicide.

The case argued, that if "aid in dying" is assisted suicide, then the New Mexico assisted suicide law is unconstitutional because it undermines the right to privacy and autonomy.

Aja Riggs is now in remission.

But, Aid in dying is assisted suicide and assisted suicide does not constitute medical treatment. Therefore prohibiting assisted suicide does not undermine the right to privacy or autonomy.

A similar case was dismissed by the Connecticut court in 2010.

Riggs told the Albuqueque journal last December that she is now in remission. She is fortunate that the court did not give her an exemption to die by assisted suicide.

Laura Schauer Ives, an attorney for Riggs and the two doctors, said after Tuesday's ruling that she plans to appeal the case to the state Supreme Court.

• New Mexico court of appeal heard assisted suicide case.
• New Mexico Attorney General appeals assisted suicide court decision.
• New Mexico lower court parrots the language and platitudes of assisted suicide advocacy groups.
• Attorney General must appeal assisted suicide court decision in New Mexico.

Summary of Liz Carr's speech at Not Dead Yet - UK rally.

The summary of Liz Carr's speech was published by Dr Peter Saunders on his blog.

Not Dead Yet assembled at 10 Downing St.

People with disabilites descended on Westminster today in droves to lobby MPs on Rob Marris’s Assisted Dying (no 2) Bill.

Marris's assisted suicide bill is due for its second reading on 11 September.

Stand-up comedian and actress Liz Carr addressed the gathering and was introduced by former Paralympian Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson.

They later visited 10 Downing Street to hand a letter to the Prime Minister.

The following is a summary by Dr Peter Saunders of Liz Carr’s speech. This is based on his (not fully legible) handwritten notes and does no justice to Liz's sense of humor and eloquence but at least it will give you the general gist. The talk was recorded so I will post a link to the video here once it has been produced. Any errors in transcription are his alone:

Liz Carr as Clarissa Mullery in Silent Witness.

Summary of Liz Carr's speech

We shouldn’t be fooled by the term ‘assisted dying’. This is assisted suicide. So let’s call it what it actually is. It’s about people having help to kill themselves.

The former name of Dignity in Dying (DID), the organisation pushing this bill, is the ‘Voluntary Euthanasia Society’. They will use any euphemism to distort the facts and disguise their wider agenda.

Their main weapons are misinformation, emotion and fear – fear about pain, dependence and disability. So we have to fight this fear with facts and truth.

Is there anyone in this room who wouldn’t prefer a pain free death with dignity? Of course not. We all want that. But this law is not the way to achieve it.

Assisted suicide is not about having a painless and pleasant death either. The drugs are unpleasant and they often do not work quickly. Far better to be in the hands of a doctor trained in good palliative care who can relieve your symptoms properly.

We are being cast as uncompassionate for opposing this bill. But we are not the people who lack compassion. We understand what it is like to suffer and to have limited options.

I’m able to speak here today because I am loud, articulate and have been on telly. But I speak on behalf of many who are unable to speak in their own defence – vulnerable and disabled people who don’t have access to the drugs, housing , social care, support and choice they would like.

Tanni Grey-Thompson

DID talk about having choice, but I speak for people who do not have a real choice. The proponents of this bill are offering a very narrow choice indeed to a very limited number of people.

If DID really believe in compassion then why don’t they use some of their millions of pounds of resources to ensure that everyone who is vulnerable or dying has good care and support rather than being steered toward suicide?

Anyone can have worth and dignity if they have proper care and support.

The term ‘right to die’ is rubbish. We are all going to die. What is really being talked about here is the right to be killed, something altogether different.

Suicide is already legal and everyone who is serious enough about it is already able to kill themselves. But this bill is about people who want someone else to do it for them. It’s about socially approved suicide. It’s about making suicide socially acceptable when it is actually something we should be trying to prevent.

Anyone can already kill themselves without assistance – by simply stopping eating, taking an overdose or even driving their wheelchair down the stairs. I’m using these examples to make a point – not suggesting that anyone do it. But the point is, why then do we need to change the law to allow people to be assisted to do what they can already do without assistance?

This bill wouldn’t actually help the tiny number of people like Tony Nicklinson who are unable to kill themselves. We will then be told that it is cruel to discriminate against these people and that we should legalise euthanasia as well.

We hear a lot about the term ‘slippery slope’. I don’t use this term because this widening of the law we see in every country that has legalised it is not a passive process. It’s much more accurate to call it ‘incremental extension’.

Let’s have no illusions about the wider agenda. I was in Luxembourg just after they changed the law. The MPs who were pushing for it wanted it for children and elderly people with dementia as well. But they knew they wouldn’t get it so they went for the softer target of the terminally ill.

It is no different here. DID say it is only for mentally competent adults with less than six months to live but think about the people they are using to make their case – Tony Nicklinson, Debbie Purdy, Jeffrey Spector, Paul Lamb, Terry Pratchett. Not one of them actually fits with their definition. None of them are actually terminally ill.

But through these cases they are softening up public opinion for a much bigger legal change.

They say they only want suicide for people with terminal illnesses. And yet they also say they want to prevent vulnerable people – say with mental illnesses – from committing suicide. But many people with terminal illnesses are not desperate to die and many people without terminal illnesses are.

So why do we have one law for one group and another law for the other? This is really just discrimination. It’s saying that it is good for people who are terminally ill to kill themselves – but bad for younger people with mental illness to do so.

But we can’t on the one hand push for suicide prevention for one group of people and encourage suicide for another group. This is a dangerous and confusing mixed message.

And just how workable will this law be in practice? Two doctors are supposed to assess whether a given patient has mental capacity, is terminally ill and has not been coerced. Think of how busy your own GP is and how well they know you. How can they possibly be expected to make an objective judgement about these things?

When I did my euthanasia tour I talked to people involved in the group Compassion and Choices – the equivalent of DID in the US. Their strategy was very clear – push for 10-15 years with stories of desperate cases and eventually public opinion will change and the law will follow.

DID are using the same techniques here and lining up all their celebrities to endorse it. They have all the money and all the media support. But we have no money and our only celebrities are me and the Pope!

I am terrified by this bill. I am terrified because as a disabled person I have experienced first-hand how poorly our society values disabled people. It's the same with elderly people.

I’m always been told, ‘If I was like you I’d kill myself’. ‘If I was like you I’d want to die.’ There are people who sincerely believe that people like me are better off dead.

But I don’t want to die. And to talk about choice when so many vulnerable and disabled people do not have a choice about basic care, housing and support is to put us in a very dangerous position indeed.

This is really serious. It’s about life and death. If this bill becomes law some disabled and vulnerable people will be subjected to exploitation and abuse and will die as a result.

The very reason we don’t allow capital punishment in this society is because the best police investigation and the best judges can come to the wrong conclusion and execute an innocent person.

This bill if passed will also mean that innocent people get killed. The current law protects people against this kind of abuse. It does not need changing.

I appeal to you to join me on 11 September in opposing this bill.

Selling assisted suicide in California. Wordplay is not enough.

This article was published by the National Review online on May 20, 2015.

Jacqueline Harvey

By Dr Jacqueline Harvey

Suicide is hard to sell. After 23 years of failed attempts to legalize assisted suicide in California, lawmakers and lobbyists may have finally found a strategy that works: They just won’t call it suicide. And on the death certificate, they’ll simply lie.

Entitled the “End of Life Option Act,” California Senate Bill 128 mandates that “the cause of death listed on an individual’s death certificate who uses aid-in-dying medication shall be the underlying terminal illness,” not the lethal dose of poison that actually caused the individual’s death. Advocates of assisted suicide coined the term “aid in dying” and concocted the rationalization that killing oneself does not qualify as suicide if you have a life expectancy of six months or less. Yet it appears that it is not palatable enough to list the preferred misnomer, “aid in dying,” as the cause of death and that the only way lawmakers and lobbyists feel they can sell self-destruction is to falsify public records. 

Suicide, Stigma, and Branding 

In 1992, California became the second state to place the assisted-suicide issue directly before the voters, a year after a similar ballot initiative was defeated in Washington State (but two years before an initiative narrowly passed in Oregon). In these early case studies on the power of wordplay, assisted-suicide proponents found that the word “suicide” was deadly to their cause. People recoil from it. Polls show that support for assisted suicide decreases by as much as 20 points when the word “suicide” is used, even though the substance of the question being asked remains unchanged. When we consider that California Proposition 161 failed by a margin of 54 to 46, it is clear how important semantics are.   

Six previous legislative attempts, from 1994 to 2007, failed. It seems that taking care to control language does not by itself distract people from the truth that a person taking poison to hasten her death is practically the very definition of suicide. Proponents of assisted suicide feel the need to call it anything but suicide and to rationalize it, because suicide is a deeply disturbing act, which we combat through suicide-prevention programs, even going so far as to physically detain persons until they are deemed to be no longer a threat to themselves. We talk suicidal people down from ledges. Assisted suicide asks these vulnerable people if they need a push.

That the End of Life Option Act tries to hide what really happens when a patient chooses to end his own life echoes the shame inherent in suicide. It also highlights the downright sanctimonious double standard in discussions of the physically and the mentally ill. When media applaud physically ill persons like the late Brittany Maynard for choosing self-destruction, or “aid in dying,” this points the finger at persons who take their own lives even though they do not have terminal physical illnesses. To euthanasia advocates, those poor mentally ill people committed suicide, but yet there is no attempt to spare them the posthumous shame of whitewashing their death certificates. The cause of death for these persons will not be listed as “depression” or “schizophrenia” or whatever underlying anguish led them to suicide. 

To be consistent, of course, rationalizations for self-destruction cannot stop with the physically ill. Many argue that, while a terminally ill person may prefer death to continuing to live even a few more months with his physical affliction, they fail to see how those who suffer with mental illnesses may prefer death to living for years with their affliction. In the Netherlands, after many years, legal assisted suicide for the dying has evolved into death on demand, with six out of ten doctors admitting to killing a patient who was simply “tired of living.” California is approaching that slippery slope. 

When Terminal Illnesses Are Not Terminal 

Assisted-suicide advocates insist that a terminal diagnosis with an arbitrarily projected life expectancy of six month is the difference between assisted suicide being sanctioned as “aid in dying” or condemned as suicide. They fail to consider that some patients with terminal illnesses do not die from their diagnosed disease. 

Consider this woman who, nine years ago, was given just two months to live after receiving the same diagnosis as Brittany Maynard. She continues to thrive. Had she chosen “aid in dying” on receiving her diagnosis, would that have been suicide? It certainly would have been a tragic, unnecessary loss of a human life. 

Then there is Jeannette Hall, who was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma in 2000. She rejected assisted suicide at the last moment and continues to speak out against assisted suicide. Had she decided differently back then, Jeannette would not have committed suicide, under the terms of Senate Bill 128: She would have died of squamous cell carcinoma, according to her death certificate, not the lethal dose of poison she ingested. This law not only has the potential to take years from people’s lives, it has the potential to pressure them into taking their own lives when they could have beaten their illness. 

California lawmakers think that even “aid in dying” is an undignified cause of death and that it should be kept out of public records. Clearly they recognize the truth of what assisted suicide is and are trying to hide it. Suicide is suicide, no matter how California lawmakers attempt to sanitize and sell it. 

Jacqueline C. Harvey, a public-policy scholar with Euthanasia Prevention Coalition International, has a Ph.D. in public administration and policy and focuses on end-of-life legislation at the state level. Follow her on Twitter @drjcharvey. 

Canadian Medical Association (CMA) delegates opposed euthanasia and assisted suicide

By Alex Schadenberg

The CMA rejected a proposal to support euthanasia and/or assisted suicide at its 146th Annual meeting that was held in Calgary Alberta (August 21 - 23).

Many media articles falsely suggested that the CMA fear debating the issues of euthanasia and assisted suicide, and yet the CMA delegates debated the issues and they voted against changing the language of the debate and they did not change their position.

Dr. Louis Hugo Francescutti

A post media news article quoted incoming CMA president Dr. Louis Hugo Francescutti as saying: 

doctors are not ducking the issue. "What physicians do when they're not sure is pause and reflect and ask for consultation."

Doctors voted to reject having a: 

“large-scale public consultation to regard medical aid in dying as appropriate end-of-life care”

When reading the media reports and the publication from the CMA it appears that they rejected the consultation based on the "loaded language" within the resolution.

For the same reason, the delegates at the CMA annual meeting rejected a resolution calling for them to: 

replace the term “physician-assisted suicide” with “physician-assisted death” in all its official documents. 

The euthanasia lobby must have realized that they didn't have enough support to change the CMA policy so they focused on changing the language of the debate.

The CMA meeting passed a motion to: 

support the right of any physician to exercise conscientious objection when faced with a request for medical aid in dying.

The CMA also passed the following palliative care resolutions:

• making palliative care services at home available to every person nearing the end of life
• integration of palliative care services into community and chronic care service delivery
• support for implementation of a collaborative palliative care model
• creation of a curriculum for training in palliative care.

It is interesting that some media articles falsely report that the CMA is unwilling to debate "assisted death" after an annual meeting where the CMA focused on the issues related to "assisted death." This is probably because the CMA remains opposed to euthanasia and assisted suicide.

The same tactic is used by some media when they claim that the federal government refuses to debate the issues of euthanasia and assisted suicide after they had a thorough debate on the issues in 2010 and rejected Bill C-384 by an overwhelming vote of 228 to 59.

I challenge the media to allow an open debate on the issues of euthanasia and assisted suicide rather than writing one-sided articles that only quote the leaders of the euthanasia lobby while ignoring the facts of the issues and the studies that prove that legalizing euthanasia is not safe.

The media need to be willing to report the facts that were published in 2012 from the 5 year meta-analysis of the Dutch euthanasia law that found 23% of all assisted deaths were not reported? The media needs to stop ignoring the study that found 47% of all assisted deaths in the Flanders region of Belgium were not reported?

The media needs to be concerned that a 2010 study found that 32% of assisted deaths in the Flanders region of Belgium were done without request.

Capital Punishment was outlawed to ensure that no Canadian is executed after a wrong conviction.

We cannot turn a blind eye to the case of the Italian man, with a botched diagnosis who was killed by assisted suicide in Switzerland or that the Netherlands have approved eugenic euthanasia for newborns with disabilities.

Canadians and especially Quebekers need to know why legalizing euthanasia is not safe. Patient safety must be paramount in our medical system.

Euthanasia and assisted suicide are life and death issues. We cannot treat it lightly.

More articles on this topic:
- Canada's Health Minister says No to euthanasia and assisted suicide.
- Canadian doctors oppose euthanasia and assisted suicide.
- Rebranding killing and suicide. The ugly truth about euthanasia.
- Most Canadian doctors oppose euthanasia.

Rebranding Killing and Suicide: The Ugly Truth About Euthanasia.

This article was written by Dr. Will Johnston, the chair of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition - BC and published in the Huffington Post on August 19, 2013

Dr. Will Johnston

Dr. Will Johnston - Vancouver BC

The Canadian Medical Association is meeting this week, and the buzz is that euthanasia and assisted suicide will be discussed. Euthanasia activists are striving to neutralize the medical opposition to their plans, and want the CMA to compromise its clearly stated principle forbidding doctors killing patients. If this principle is broken, an invasive weed will have entered our garden.

As an analogy, remember it took centuries of work to rid our society of capital punishment. Finally, we reached the point that we did not trust any system with the legal power to kill. Did we say to ourselves, "There are probably only a few innocent people executed, and one of them is very unlikely to be me... or someone I care about." ? No, the mere possibility that the law would be wrongly used -- on anyone -- was finally enough to justify a complete prohibition of the death penalty.

Moreover, it was time for the state to stop implicating itself in any killing. Why then, a few years later, are we talking about the state giving legal power to doctors to allow them to kill selected patients? Do we truly believe that those failures to protect the depressed and vulnerable under other suicide and euthanasia systems could never happen here? Do we have any idea what we would be trading for our present privilege of insisting that our doctors and nurses are not willfully implicated in any killing, ever?

The art of euphemism -- of sugar coating your verbal meaning -- has been raised to a syrupy peak by the proponents of euthanasia. When killing and suicide can be rebranded in the hearts and minds of average Canadians, the death lobby wins. What is truly being promised is the medical equivalent of a silent bullet in the head. The irony is that we don't need it. Symptom control at the end of life has never been better, and the right thing to do is to deliver it when needed. 

Most of the euthanasia advocates I have met witnessed the poorly managed death of someone close to them and so joined the nearest right-to-die lobby group. This is naive but understandable. For these activists, indignation at seeing substandard care has trumped common sense. Common sense should tell us that we and our loved ones will not be safer or more empowered when the right to kill is given to doctors and nurses, under any system that can be dreamed up.

Canadians were recently horrified by the deaths of two children when a deadly snake could not be kept caged. The suicide and euthanasia system so desperately wanted by some activists would be like that cage: The snake would not stay in it forever. We are now the fortunate inhabitants, like most people in the civilized world, of a place where euthanasia has been banned. If ever legalized, it will send its tendrils into every hospital and care facility.

With each challenge to the ban, the euthanasia promoters have only to win once. In defending itself, Canada has to win every time. The vote against euthanasia was 79% in Parliament in 2010, and it was rejected by 74% of doctors in a recent CMA poll. This should not lead to complacency. The assaults on the key medical principle will not stop. Our wisdom will need endurance.

Gallup: Support for assisted suicide fluctuates based on the wording of the question.

Support for assisted suicide in America is at a low when the question includes the word "suicide"

By Alex Schadenberg, 
International Chair, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.

A Gallup survey conducted (May 2 - 7, 2013) found that support for assisted suicide fluctuates by almost 20% based on the wording of the question.

The survey found that: 

51% of Americans support assisted suicide when the process is described as doctors helping a patient "commit suicide" while 70% of Americans supported assisted suicide when it was described as allowing doctors to "end the patient's life by some painless means."

The report from Gallup stated:

Gallup has asked both questions of U.S. adults aged 18 and older annually since 2001, as part of its Values and Beliefs survey. This year's update was based on interviews with 1,535 adults, and each question was asked of a separate half-sample.

Gallup reported that support for assisted suicide is down in recent years. The recent Gallup poll indicated that 45% of Americans were opposed to assisted suicide, which is the highest level since the poll question began in 1996. Gallup reported that:

... current support -- with 51% of Americans in favor and 45% opposed -- is similar to that of the previous three years, and is nearly identical to attitudes in 1996. In the interim, support steadily rose to 68% by 2001 and remained above 60% through 2004, after which it started to falter.

We learned from the recent defeat of the assisted suicide referendum in Massachusetts that once people learn more about assisted suicide, they become less likely to support it. 

Polling originally indicated that people in Massachusetts supported assisted suicide. After a good campaign informing Massachusetts voters of what assisted suicide is, it was defeated.

Several years ago I attended the World Federation of Right to Die Societies Conference. The euthanasia lobby knew from polling and focus groups that changing the language of the debate and message discipline would lead to more support for assisted suicide and euthanasia. 

The Gallup survey report concluded that:

A wording that refers to the patient's intention to end his or her life as "suicide," doesn't say family members are involved in the decision, and doesn't specify that the procedure will involve "painless means" produces lower support than the alternative wording. However, the resulting difference offers important insights into the complex nature of Americans' views on this question, as well as the negative connotation suicide has, generally. Underscoring this, the same poll finds just 16% of Americans saying suicide is morally acceptable. At the same time, the public is evenly split over whether "doctor-assisted suicide" is morally acceptable: 45% say it is, and 49% say it is not.

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition has also learned that certain language is more effective. We agree with the Gallup poll that the use of the term assisted suicide or assisting a suicide is more effective than terms like: prescribed death, aid in dying or assisted dying.

Links to previous polling information.
- Do Americans want to legalize assisted suicide?
- Canadians want good end-of-life care not euthanasia or assisted suicide.
- More Americans believe that assisted suicide is morally wrong.
- Why the assisted suicide referendum was defeated in Massachusetts.

There is no role for palliative care in providing euthanasia

The following letter was written by Dr. Manuel Borod, the director of Supportive and Palliative Care at the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal Quebec. 

This letter was published in the Montreal Gazette on January 21, 2013 under the title: There is no role for palliative care in providing euthanasia

Re: “End of life rules to be set out in new law” (Gazette, Jan. 16) 

Dr. Manuel Borod

In the reports about the proposed end-of-life legislation, there have been numerous statements that may confuse readers. 

You report that the proposed law would protect the right to refuse treatment, withdraw treatment, withhold treatment, receive palliative care — including the right to receive palliative sedation, and the right to have medical assistance in dying. The first four of these rights are already generally accepted standards of care. 

And a statement describing palliative sedation as “the process of putting a dying patient to sleep, ending feeding and artificial hydration, a procedure that ends in death” is completely misleading and false. Palliative sedation is legal, does not necessarily hasten death (as noted, the patient is dying), and on our palliative care ward, we have very specific policies and follow international guidelines as to when and how to initiate this treatment. 

The only thing new here would be to allow an act that directly causes death, and this is euthanasia. The rest is a smokescreen. 

It is an affront to all those who care for the terminally ill to refer to this act as death with dignity — it is our objective that all our patients die with dignity. It is also misleading to refer to euthanasia as medical or physician aid in dying — once again, all the physicians, nurses, psychologists, social workers, music therapists, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, spiritual care counsellors, pharmacists, dietitians, volunteers and coordinators who work with the dying patient offer aid in dying. 

This has become a political and legal issue, and the lawmakers should call this act what it really is: lawful death or legally acceptable death. 

If the legislators decide to put this act into law, they should also provide for judges and technicians to approve the request and carry out the orders. There is no role for palliative care in providing euthanasia for terminally ill patients. The proposed law calls for improving and expanding the role of palliative care. The opposite will result if palliative care and euthanasia are expected to coexist under the same roof. 

Manuel Borod MDDirector, Division of Supportive and Palliative CareMcGill University Health CentreMontreal

Physician speaks on Oregon experience of assisted suicide

An excellent article that was written by Christopher Pineo and published today in the Boston Pilot entitled: Physician speaks on Oregon experience of assisted suicide.

Dr. Kenneth Stevens

Dr. Kenneth Stevens, the Vice-President of the Oregon based group - Physicians for Compassionate Care, recently spoke at a conference concerning his personal experience with legal assisted suicide in his state of Oregon.

The article started by reporting on an experience Stevens had with one of his patients. The article stated:

Twelve years ago, a patient visited Dr. Kenneth Stevens after being diagnosed with a form of cancer that would kill her in six months without treatment, seeking drugs to end her life. Over a course of the next few weeks Dr. Stevens spoke to her about other options. 

"If my doctor had believed in assisted suicide, I would be dead. I thank him and all my doctors for helping me to choose 'life with dignity.' Assisted suicide should not be legal. I hope Massachusetts does not make this terrible mistake," she wrote in a 2011 letter to the Boston Globe.

The article states that Stevens, who is an oncologist with 46 years experience, first focused on the language of the debate. The article stated:

"The legalization of physician assisted suicide does not give any new rights to the patient. They say, 'I want a right to die.' Well, you are going to die. You already have that right. Its purpose is to legally protect doctors who write prescriptions for lethal drugs," he said. 

He said clearly defining the issue should remain at the center of the effort to fight physician assisted suicide. 

"It is important to use proper language. It is physician-assisted suicide. That's what it is," he said. 

He said attempts to legitimize or legalize physician assisted suicide are based in the language of driving an agenda not promoting the development of healthcare or patient needs.

Stevens was then quoted for his comments on the campaign the occurred in Oregon and how Compassion & Choices has been able to gain support for assisted suicide in Oregon. Stevens stated:

...it was passed as a result of a campaign led by what was once called the Hemlock Society, which has taken up the name Compassion and Choices after merging with other organizations in recent years. 

"They are leading the campaign here. They use euphemisms to distort the truth. They use double-speak," he said. 

He said traditional groups in the field of medicine make clear distinctions regarding the issue of physician assisted suicide. 

"The American Medical Association code of ethics also says that 'allowing physicians to participate in assisted suicide would cause more harm than good. Physician assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician's role as healer,'" he said, quoting the AMA's Code of Medical Ethics. 

He said physician assisted suicide laws in Oregon have breached the trust between doctors and patients when other factors become involved. 

"Assisted suicide has turned medicine upside down. There can be no safe haven, no safe harbor for a patient when the doctor may kill them. We don't care for patients by killing them," he said.

Stevens then speaks about how legalizing assisted suicide changes doctors, he stated:

Dr. Stevens said that beyond uprooting the traditional values regarding life, the laws can degrade care for patients. 

"Assisted suicide leads to the dumbing down of medicine," he said. 

He said no skill is required to write a prescription for life ending drugs, taking the focus off of the doctor's role in determining a solution to sometimes simple medical issues. 

In his role as an educator he also must anticipate the needs of students. 

"As we interview prospective students we don't usually ask, 'Do you want to go into medicine to kill people?' That's not what we ask," he said. 

He said implementation of these laws can create a niche for physicians who make lethal treatments a kind of speciality. 

"There was a report from a state agency where from 2001 to 2007, 109 doctors --which is about 1 percent of Oregon doctors-- wrote 271 fatal prescriptions. Of those 271 fatal prescriptions, about a fourth of them where written by only three doctors," he said.

Barbara Wagner

Stevens then spoke about the cases of Barbara Wagner. He stated:

He also addressed the inherent danger of laws supporting physician assisted suicide wherein the expense of treatment becomes a factor in determining which care should be available to which patients. He pointed out that the elderly, infirm and disabled come under threat in this way. 

He presented the case of a woman denied experimental chemotherapy treatment under her health plan, but approved for assisted suicide.

Dr Stevens concluded his presentation with the following remarks:

"It is an ideology that a patient should be able to take their own life with a doctor's assistance," he said. 

"The legalization of assisted suicide is anti-science. It is against medical care. It's against scientific medicine," Dr. Stevens said.

Dr Kenneth Stevens has tirelessly worked to expose the reality of assisted suicide. It is important that people in Massachusetts  listen to his experience and vote NO on question 2 in Massachusetts in November.

UK judge decides not to dehydrate woman to death

Royal Court of Justice

Yesterday, Mr. Justice Baker refused to grant the application by the family of “M” to have her intentionally dehydrated to death. Justice Baker determined that "M" continued to have "quality of life".

In the UK the Bland decision (February 1993) decided that a person who was unconscious and determined to be in a Persistent Vegetative State (PVS) could have their hydration and nutrition withdrawn with the intention of causing death. The Bland case concerned Tony Bland who experienced a profound cognitive injury in the Hillsborough disaster on April 15, 1989.

Since the Bland decision, many people in the UK who were deemed to be in a “PVS” state have been dehydrated to death, with the permission of the court.

The “M case” is a different because “M” is conscious even though the court was told that her responses are minimal and unreliable.

Justice Baker stated:

"I accept the evidence of the carers, who have far greater experience of living with M in recent years than do members of her family whose visits have become less frequent as time has gone by."

"M does have positive experiences and …although her life is extremely restricted, it is not without pleasures, albeit small ones."

Therefore “M” will not die by dehydration because it was determined that she had a “quality of life.”

All forms of euthanasia reduce the value of certain human beings and deny equality and dignity to every human being.

To withdraw fluids and food from a person who is not otherwise dying, even if that person has a significant cognitive disability, is euthanasia because death is directly and intentionally caused by the withdrawal of basic care, that being fluids and food. Whether fluids and food are provided by a fork, a spoon or a tube, they represent a basic necessary of life that should be provided unless the person cannot assimilate or is actually nearing death.

For someone who is not otherwise dying, death by dehydration results in a painful death.

Whether “M” had a certain level of quality of life or not, the issue should be whether or not the decision of the court would have caused her death, rather than allow her to live until she dies a natural death.

The Bland decision was wrong because it did not differentiate between the definitions of treatment and care. If the Bland decision had determined that only medical treatment could be withdrawn, but not basic care, meaning the provision of the basic necessaries of life, then a line would have been drawn that it is not acceptable for society to cause a persons death, which is different than allowing a person to die. The result of the language contortion is that people are being dehydrated to death because they are living with a cognitive disability.

We applaud the decision by Justice Baker, while recognizing that until the Bland decision is redefined, that other cognitively disabled people, such as “M” will intentionally die by dehydration, even though they would not be otherwise dying.

Euthanasia lobby continues to engineer language.

Wesley Smith

Wesley Smith published a blog article last Thursday, July 22, 2010 on the continual Word Engineering by the euthanasia lobby. Compassion & Choices (C & C), that Stephen Drake from Not Dead Yet refers to as Conflation and Con Jobs, has published a new glossery of terminology.

We must not use word engineered terms by the euthanasia lobby such as: "Aid in Dying" or their previous term "Assisted Death".

The fact is that we all want Aid in Dying or an Assisted death but we do not want to be killed by someone who lethally injects us or who gives us a lethal dose when we are depressed or feeling abandoned.

I have always said that if there is nothing wrong with assisted suicide, then why do you need to lie to me about it?

Here is the reprint of Wesley's blog comments:

Compassion & Choices Word Engineering


Proponents of assisted suicide are ever trying to fool all the people all the time. One method is word engineering. Ever since euthanasia advocacy began over 100 years ago, advocates have continually sought the perfect phrase or advocacy term that will convince society to swallow their hemlock. Indeed, the first such word was “euthanasia” (good death) itself, which before early mercy killing advocates co-opted it, meant dying naturally and peacefully in a state of grace.

Compassion and Choices (formerly, Hemlock Society), even uses euphemisms in its name. And now, the organization has published a glossary pitching assisted suicide as “aid in dying,” a euphemistic term if one was ever invented. From C & C’s website:

"Aid in dying" – aid in dying is a practice, legal only in Oregon, Washington and Montana, that allows mentally competent, terminally ill adults to request a prescription for life-ending medication from their physician. This medication must be self-administered. Always use aid in dying instead of assisted dying, physician-assisted suicide or death with dignity. This phrase is hyphenated when used as a modifier. Example: In Washington we passed an aid-in-dying bill. Or, aid in dying has been legal in Oregon since 1994 and Washington and Montana since 2008.

Has there ever been so much gobbledygook pitched? But C & C claims that the accurate and descriptive term, physician-assisted suicide, is the inaccurate phrase:

Physician-assisted suicide – An inaccurate and biased term often used to describe a terminally ill, mentally competent person’s choice to control the manned and time of death by self-administered life-ending medications prescribed by a physician. Preferred language is aid in dying.

What propagandists. The opposite is actually true–as a Connecticut judge recently ruled when C & C tried to legalize assisted suicide there by simply redefining the term. (http://alexschadenberg.blogspot.com/2010/06/no-appeal-by-compassion-choices-in.html)

And the moral of the story? When movement uses euphemisms and obfuscation to convince the people that there is nothing wrong with its agenda–there is something very wrong with its agenda.

Link to the original blog: http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/2010/07/22/c-c-word-engineering/

Language Matters

Stephen Drake, of Not Yet Dead fame, published a blog comment concerning the language debate concerning the word assisted suicide. He contacted me and asked me for some input, and this is a part of what he published.

Using and Promoting Change of Language to Make the Objectionable Acceptable

Stephen Drake

Last week, I happened to be watching The Ed Show on MSNBC. Thankfully, the host - who I think is trying to be a liberal imitation of Sean Hannity - was on vacation. Christopher Hayes, Washington editor of The Nation, was subbing for the regular host.

I was kind of paying half-attention, getting ready for a road trip the next day, when my attention focused sharply during the start of a commentary by Hayes (starts about halfway through the transcript of the show):

Imagine for a moment our country elected a bunch of people who thought that rape should be legal. Now, these pro-rape politicians knew that simply coming out and proposing that we legalize rape would be toxic and odious and rightly inspire moral revulsion among the populace. So they say this instead. Look, we don‘t support rape, but we want to legalize unilateral physical intimacy. And after they say that, they set out to make sure that no one ever called rape, rape but instead in every instance called it unilateral physical intimacy.

It‘s pretty clear that if supposedly objective news sources, say, for instance “The New York Times”, adopted that same language, they would be granting the pro-rape camp a monumental political victory. Unilateral physical intimacy is not a neutral phrase in our little thought experiment. It is propaganda, as ideologically phrased as the term welfare queen or Islamo-fascist.

Well, the same is true for the pro-torture euphemism enhanced interrogation techniques.

This immediately reminded me of Conflation and Con Job's (aka Compassion & Choices) recent maneuvers to get the Connecticut Superior Court to recognize the term "aid in dying" as separate and distinct from "assisted suicide." This was just the highest profile tactic in a long-term campaign by C&C to replace the term "assisted suicide" with "aid in dying." More commonly, the campaign is carried out with the same talking points in op-eds written by C&C members, like this one that appeared in the July 3 edition of the Bozemon Daily Chronicle.

Why is it important to them? Why spend so much effort and energy on a simple phrase?

Alex Schadenberg

Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, attended the World Federation of Right to Die Societies Conference in Toronto in 2006. Here is what he says about what he learned at a session conducted by C & C:

One of the speakers at that conference spoke about the focus groups and polling data that had been done by Compassion & Choices. This data found that the term "Aid in Dying" improved the acceptance of the political agenda of their group by 15% over the term assisted suicide. The speaker explained that once the public accepted the term "Aid in Dying" they would be able to win the debate in the public square. The same speaker also explained how the terms assisted death and assisted dying were better than assisted suicide, but then the speaker strongly advised the participants of the conference to stop using the term assisted suicide and always use the term "aid in dying." (emphasis added.)

The term "aid in dying" is a type of soft euphemism. Everyone wants aid in dying, whether that be pain control, symptom management, good care, but most people have no intention of dying by assisted suicide. But if you ask a person, do you support aid in dying, they will more likely say YES, without ever thinking that they are supporting assisted suicide.

The speaker then explained how Compassion & Choices had tried to get the Editorial Boards of the newspapers in California, where an assisted suicide bill had been presented, to change their language use from assisted suicide to "aid in dying". The speaker also explained how they were working to get professional organizations to adopt the term "aid in dying".

It is important that we use accurate language and not help the suicide lobby change the language by using the same language ourselves.

Many people who oppose assisted suicide use the term assisted dying. This is not as bad as "Aid in Dying" but it has similar defects. I may want assistance with dying, but that doesn't mean I want to die by a lethal dose.

Anyway, the Conflation & Con Job's people (Compassion & Choices) are busy attempting to change the language in order to sanitize what assisted suicide actually is.
Link to his blog comment: http://notdeadyetnewscommentary.blogspot.com/2010/07/using-and-promoting-change-of-language.html