Disability Rights Toolkit for Advocacy Against Legalization of Assisted Suicide

This resource was originally published on the Not Dead Yet website.

Marilyn Golden

"If this bill passes, some people’s lives will be ended without their consent, through mistakes and abuse. No safeguards have ever been enacted or proposed that can prevent this outcome, which can never be undone."

- Marilyn Golden, Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund

Introduction

The purpose of this Toolkit is to give disability rights advocates an organized set of resources to assist in defeating proposals to legalize assisted suicide in state legislatures.  The Toolkit is divided into seven brief sections, each consisting of basic information and links to related resources with more information.  The seven sections are:

1. Why disability advocacy groups oppose legalizing assisted suicide
2. Educating and organizing disability opposition
3. Meeting with legislators and policy leaders
4. Testifying at hearings
5. Working with the media
6. Conducting direct actions – leafleting, rallying
7. Working in coalition

All of the major national disability groups that have taken a position on assisted suicide oppose bills to legalize the practice as a matter of public policy.  The disability role in defeating these bills has increased in visibility and importance in the last few years as both media and various stakeholders have acknowledged our effectiveness.  It is critical that our voice be heard wherever assisted suicide bills are introduced and considered.

 1. Why disability advocacy groups oppose legalizing assisted suicide

Proponents of legal assisted suicide for the terminally ill frequently claim that the opposing views of disability organizations aren’t relevant.  Nevertheless, although people with disabilities aren’t usually terminally ill, the terminally ill are almost always disabled.   People with disabilities and chronic conditions live on the front lines of the health care system that serves (and, sadly, often underserves) dying people.  One might view us as the “canaries in the coal mine,” alerting others to dangers we see first, but, unlike the canary, we loudly object to being seen as expendable.

A.  Background:

Not Dead Yet initially formed in 1996 to help articulate a disability rights critique of proposals to legalize assisted suicide.  Some of our initial observations, issues and concerns are as valid today as they were in the early years,[1] some even more so:

Assisted Suicide - It's Civil Rights for the Affluent

This article was published by Townhall.com on April 12, 2015

Debra Saunders

By Debra J Saunders

The assisted-suicide movement is the rare self-proclaimed civil rights movement that exists to cater to the wishes of affluent Americans. On Tuesday, the California Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on SB 128, a bill to legalize assisted suicide in the state. (Proponents don't like the word suicide, so they call the measure the "End of Life Option Act.") Supporters talk of their fear of medical personnel's prolonging their lives, of pain and lack of autonomy; opponents fear that the bill's passage would represent a callous act of cultural abandonment of the sick and disabled.

I don't mean to suggest that life is easy for those who have a personal stake in the bill's passage. Christina Symonds, 43, gave heart-rending testimony about her battle with ALS. Because she wants the ability to choose assisted suicide, her family moved to Oregon, which legalized assisted suicide 17 years ago. "I do not want to live my last days in a wheelchair, fully paralyzed, connected to a breathing machine," she said. "To me, that is the picture of horror." That is certainly not the end any young mother would choose.

Clearly, California should have a system that provides Symonds the best care and best pain control possible. Pain control has come a long way since Oregon legalized assisted suicide. But there's this sleight of hand on the part of supporters of assisted suicide. They talk about the need to avoid pain, when their real focus is their fear of losing control. It is an understandable, human fear, but it would be wrong to change the emphasis of medicine on healing to assuage that fear.

Democratic state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, a bill co-sponsor, referred to "the lack of dignity" that can occur toward the end of life. That language implies that sick people who choose to live lack dignity.

Marilyn Golden

Marilyn Golden of the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund is living proof that someone with disabilities can face unwanted obstacles and thrive. She tried to prompt committee Democrats to think about the many things that can and do go wrong. Doctors misdiagnose. Family members have the ability to make elderly relatives feel unwanted and alone. Lethal prescriptions are cheaper than complicated treatment, so HMOs have an incentive to push patients out the door. Disease can lead to depression, but that can be treated. When people first get a horrific diagnosis, they think they want to die; later many find that their prognosis turned out to be wrong or that they want to live what life they have left.

Activist promotes assisted suicide based on her decision to force her mother to continue medical treatment.

By Alex Schadenberg

Executive Director and International Chair - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Amber Phillips

An assisted suicide campaigner in California says that she is supporting the California assisted suicide bill because she regrets - "forcing her mother to undergo chemotherapy against her will."

Some people may be surprised by my comment, but Amber Phillips was wrong to force her mother to undergo further treatment, and if her mother had stopped receiving treatment earlier, her death would likely have been very different.

People have the right to refuse medical treatment and in many cases it is the better decision. Refusing medical treatment is not assisted suicide or euthanasia.

Cancer treatment has improved but when a person continues to receive treatment, there comes a time when the treatment, may be extending life, but the break-down to the body that results from the treatment causes a far more painful death. 

Amber Phillips is quoted in a Daily Mail article as stating that she forced her mother Connie to undergo chemotherapy after her mother wanteded the treatment to stop. The article states:

She explained that her mother 'did radiation, hormone therapy and chemotherapy, had her lymph nodes removed, had a breast removed, meditated, and all numbers of treatments.' 

Despite the treatments, Phillips said that in 2008 her mother's cancer spread from her breasts to her bones and her lungs. 

Phillips said her mother did not want to receive more treatment but that she did it for her family because they could not bear to be without her. 

'We nagged her, encouraged her to continue treatment when she didn't want to, bought her wigs when she started losing her hair, managed her diet with cancer-friendly foods, held her hand, and begged her to continue fighting for us,' Phillips said.

Connie Phillips at graduation.

The article continues:

Phillips says she loved her mother so that's why she wanted her to live. Looking back she says she wishes she would have tuned in more to her mother's suffering and allowed her to end her treatment sooner. 

'We just wanted her to live and we wanted her to continue fighting,' Phillips said wistfully. 

'We really just didn't get it. We really bought into the possibility or the fairy tale that things were going to get better, when it was so clear that they were getting worse and worse.' 

Phillips says she ignored the signs that her mother was going to die, especially after her father died of a heart attack in the Spring of 2012. 

'I just doubled down,' she says. 

'I just felt like I couldn't lose both of them. I just thought I was going to fall apart. 

'It was a lot of 'me' focus – what I could handle.'

The article states that in June 2012, that Phillips finally called hospice care. But the article continues, admitting that her mother Connie wasn't prescribed morphine until July:

'After the worst day of my life to that point, I gave my consent to put her back on morphine, knowing that she would die and knowing that this is what she wanted,'

Why did Amber wait so long to arrange pain and symptom management for her mother? Connie Phillips died on August 1, 2012.

Amber Phillips is now promoting assisted suicide based on the suffering caused by her decisions that resulted in her mother's horrible death.

Connie Phillips suffered, not because she couldn't accept that her death was nearing, but because her daughter couldn't accept that her mother was dying.

It amazes me how cases that sound self-centred and abusive, like this one, become a clarion call for killing by assisted suicide.

Czech nurse kills 6 patients to decrease her workload.

By Alex Schadenberg

International Chair - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Vera Maresova

A nurse in the Czech Republic has admitted to killing 6 people with a massive dose of potassium in order to decrease her workload.

According to an article in the Daily Mail, Vera Maresova, 50, confessed to killing five women and one man over a four-year period at a hospital in Rumburk in the Czech Republic.

The Daily Mail article stated:

Dubbed 'Nurse Death' by local media, Maresova was initially arrested over the death of a 70-year-old woman last August, but has now admitted killing five more people between 2010 and 2014 following a police investigation. 

According to the prosecution, Maresova injected the potassium straight into the blood stream of her six elderly patients, which caused them to suffer heart failure and eventually death. 

All of her victims were already in the intensive care unit at the hospital and it is believed Maresova thought their deaths would simply be attributed to natural causes.

Rumburk Hospital

According to the Daily Mail Prosecutor Frantisek Stibor said:

'She is not insane and knew exactly what she was doing. Therefore she is fit to stand trial. 

'She used her knowledge of medicine to cause malfunctions in heart rhythms which led to heart failure and death.' 

The first murder was in January 2010 and was followed by another at the end of 2011. 

In April 2012 she killed her third victim and three more between February and June 2014.

Maresova confessed to her crimes and will likely live the rest of her life in jail.

Maresova would not likely have been prosecuted in Belgium, where euthanasia was legalized in 2002.

A Belgian study in 2007 on the role of nurses in physician-assisted death found that of the 120 euthanasia deaths that nurses were involved in 14 nurses admitted to lethally injecting the patient. Belgian law does not permit nurses to do this. 

There have been no attempted prosecutions in Belgium for abuse of the euthanasia law.

Connecticut assisted suicide bill is likely dead.

Stephen Mendelsohn from
Second Thoughts Connecticut

By Alex Schadenberg

International Chair - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

For the past three years, the assisted suicide lobby in Connecticut has introduced an assisted suicide bill, paid lobbyists to promote the bill, and then a coalition of people opposing assisted suicide successfully defeat the bill.

Disability right group, Second Thoughts Connecticut, in coalition with other groups working in a unified manner, such as the Family Institute of Connecticut, have defeated the assisted suicide bills in Connecticut three years in a row.

An article by Daniela Altimari in the Hartford Courant states that assisted suicide bill - HB 7015 has likely died in committee again. The article quotes Michael Culhane who explaines how the bill was defeated:

Opponents have been counting votes since the bill was drafted in February and knew support was weak, he said. 

Culhane said the measure's failure to move forward was due to a large and diverse coalition that worked together to persuade legislators that the bill was bad public policy. 

It was a collective effort that produced the results that were announced today.

Stephen Mendelsohn, from Second Thoughts Connecticut, stated:

"We would urge the General Assembly to focus on improving hospice, palliative care and home care ... rather than continue to waste time on an issue that has now been rejected three years in a row without a committee vote,'' said Stephen Mendelsohn, a disability rights activist with the group Second Thoughts Connecticut. "Three strikes and you are out."

Assisted suicide bills, such as the Connecticut bill, are defeated when a unified coalition of people from differing perspectives and political ideologies work together for the sole purpose of protecting people from assisted suicide.

Thank you to the coalition leaders in Connecticut who successfully worked together again.

• Assisted suicide would be fraught with problems and abuses.
• Maggie Karner: Assisted suicide would undermine my cancer battle.
• Assisted suicide opponents meet in Connecticut.

Irish Symposium: Saving Lives NOT Causing Deaths - Dublin - June 6, 2015.

RDS Center

Hope Ireland and the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC) - International have organized an International Conference on euthanasia and assisted suicide at the RDS Center in Dublin Ireland on June 6, 2015.

Everyone deserves justice, fairness - never more so than when they are facing death.

Speakers include: Alex Schadenberg (EPC - Canada), Paul Russell (HOPE - Australia), Henk Reitsma (Netherlands), Caroline Roux (France), Tom Mortier (Belgium), Amy Hasbrouck (Not Dead Yet - Canada), Dr. Kevin Fitzpatrick (Ireland) – others to be announced.

To register please go online to: www.hopeire.com or send your details to Dr Kevin Fitzpatrick by email at: kevin@hopeire.com or by calling: 00 353 (0)857474607.

Attendance is free for the one-day conference. 

The RDS building, chosen both for its location and its ease of access.

The venue can accommodate up to 120 people, so places are limited. Please sign up early. Registration is possible online, by phone or mail and, if places remain, on the day.

The law in Ireland protects dying people from fear, suggestion, coercion and abuse. Removing legal protections is dangerous and will quickly lead to people who are not terminally ill dying under these laws.

Hope Ireland is a new organisation to combat moves to legalise euthanasia/assisted suicide.

Send donations to:
Hope (Ireland)
120-121 Baggot Street Lower,
Dublin 2

California: Vote NO on assisted suicide bill SB 128

Margret Dore

By Margaret Dore

To read my legal/policy analysis against SB 128, (click here). To view supporting documentation, (click here).

Key points include:

People "eligible" for assisted suicide/euthanasia may have years, even decades, to live, i.e., if they don't die of assisted suicide/euthanasia under SB 128. The bill encourages people with years to live to throw away their lives.

The thrust of SB 128 is to protect doctors and other participants in a patient's death, including family members - not patients. This is done in three ways:

1. Taking the teeth out of patient protections;
2. Requiring the death certificate, which is the official cause of death, to reflect a natural death; and
3. A near complete lack of transparency - in Oregon, similar confidentiality provisions preclude disclosure to law enforcement

The bottom line, patient choice and control is not assured. SB 128 is, instead, a recipe for patient abuse. Other problems include steerage to suicide by healthcare providers and the risk of suicide contagion.

Margaret Dore
Law Offices of Margaret K. Dore, P.S.
Choice is an Illusion, a nonprofit corporation
www.margaretdore.com
www.choiceillusion.org

1001 4th Avenue, Suite 4400
Seattle, WA 98154

Physician-assisted suicide is a social contagion.

The following article was published in the Washington Times on April 6, 2014.

Ryan Anderson

By Ryan T. Anderson

In 2012, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s widow, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, campaigned against physician-assisted suicide in Massachusetts. She pointed out that most people wish for a good death “surrounded by loved ones, perhaps with a doctor and/or clergyman at our bedside.” But with physician-assisted suicide, you get “a prescription for up to 100 capsules, dispensed by a pharmacist, taken without medical supervision, followed by death, perhaps alone. That seems harsh and extreme to me.”

Indeed it is.

Yet today, at least 18 states are considering allowing physician-assisted suicide. The media frame the debate as one about individual autonomy, especially in the face of devastating illnesses that rightly capture our empathy.

But the merciful thing would be to expect doctors to do no harm and ease the pain of those who suffer and to support families and ministries in providing that care.

Allowing physicians to help patients kill themselves changes the practice of medicine and our entire culture. Our laws impact society as a whole — not just a small handful of afflicted individuals. The question is: Will our law and public policy shape our culture to view the elderly and the disabled as burdens to be disposed of, or as people to be loved and cared for?

Human life doesn’t need to be extended by every medical means possible, but a person should never be intentionally killed. Doctors may help their patients to die a dignified death from natural causes, but they should not kill their patients or help them to kill themselves.

Physician-assisted suicide is bad policy for four reasons:

1. Physician-assisted suicide endangers the weak and the marginalized. Safeguards purporting to minimize this risk have proved to be inadequate. Over time, they are often watered down or eliminated. In the Netherlands, several government-sponsored surveys have disclosed that doctors have intentionally administered lethal injections to thousands of patients without a request. They have also failed to report thousands of cases to the authorities.

2. Physician-assisted suicide changes the culture in which medicine is practiced. It corrupts the profession of medicine by permitting the tools of healing to be used as techniques for killing. Physician-assisted suicide fundamentally distorts the doctor-patient relationship because it reduces patients’ trust of doctors and doctors’ undivided commitment to the life and health of their patients. Physician-assisted suicide offers a cheap, quick fix in a world of increasingly scarce health care resources, thus creating perverse incentives for insurance providers and health care financing.

3. Physician-assisted suicide would harm our entire culture, especially our family and intergenerational obligations. The temptation to view elderly or disabled family members as burdens will increase, as will the temptation for those family members to internalize this attitude and view themselves as burdens. Physician-assisted suicide undermines social solidarity and true compassion.

4. Physician-assisted suicide violates human dignity and denies equality before the law. A just legal system respects human dignity in everyone. It takes all reasonable steps to prevent the innocent, of any age or condition, from being devalued and killed. Classifying a subgroup of people as legally eligible to be killed violates our nation’s commitment to equality-by allowing lives to be judged as no longer “worth living.”

Instead of embracing physician-assisted suicide, we should respond to suffering with true compassion and solidarity. People seeking physician-assisted suicide typically suffer from depression or other mental illnesses, as well as simply from loneliness. We must respond with appropriate care and human presence.

For those in physical pain, pain management and other palliative medicine can manage their symptoms effectively. For those facing imminent death, hospice care and fellowship can accompany them in their last days. Anything less falls short of what human dignity requires.

Doctors should help their patients to die a dignified death of natural causes, not assist in killing. Physicians are always to care, never to kill. Citizens and policymakers need to resist the push by pressure groups, academic elites, and the media to sanction physician-assisted suicide.

• Always care, Never Kill.

• Ryan T. Anderson Phd is the William E. Simon Fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center.

The effects of depression on the body

This article was printed with permission from healthline.

We all feel sad or anxious at times. It’s a normal part of life. However, clinical depression does interfere with your ability to function. Depression affects how you feel and can also cause changes throughout your body. Major depression is a serious medical condition that has a dramatic effect on your quality of life.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, about 6.7 percent of adults in the United States have depression. People with depression often develop other health issues as well. Major depression is also called major depressive illness or clinical depression.

Central Nervous System.

Depression can cause a lot of symptoms, many of which are easy to dismiss or ignore. It may be especially difficult to detect in children, who can’t articulate their symptoms, or in older adults, who may blame their symptoms on aging.

Symptoms of depression include overwhelming sadness, grief, and a sense of guilt. People with depression often complain about feeling tired all the time. They also tend to have trouble sleeping. Other symptoms include irritability, anger, and loss of interest in things that used to bring pleasure, including sex. It may be described as a feeling of emptiness or hopelessness. Some people may find it difficult to put these feelings into words. Frequent episodes of crying may be a sign of depression, but not everyone who is depressed cries.

Other symptoms include inability to concentrate, memory problems, and difficulty making decisions. People with depression may have trouble maintaining a normal work schedule or fulfill social obligations.

Some people who are depressed may use alcohol or drugs. They may become reckless or abusive. A depressed person may consciously avoid talking about it or try to mask the problem. People suffering from depression may be preoccupied with thoughts of death or hurting themselves. There’s an increased risk of suicide.

Children get depressed, too. Signs include clinginess, worry, and unwillingness to attend school. Children may be excessively irritable and negative.

Depression can cause headaches, chronic body aches, and pain that may not respond to medication.

Digestive System.

Depression can affect the appetite. Some people cope by overeating or binging. This can lead to weight and obesity-related illnesses like type 2 diabetes. Others lose their appetite or fail to eat nutritious food. Eating problems can lead to stomachaches, cramps, constipation, or malnutrition. Symptoms may not improve with medication.

Depression and stress are closely related. Stress hormones speed heart rate and make blood vessels tighten, putting your body in a prolonged state of emergency. Over time, this can lead to heart disease.

Cardiovascular and Immune Systems

According to Harvard Medical School, patients who are depressed when hospitalized for a heart condition are two to five times likelier to have severe chest pain, heart attack, or stroke, in the next year. Recurrence of cardiovascular problems is linked more closely to depression than to smoking, diabetes, high blood pressure, or high cholesterol. Untreated, depression raises the risk of dying after a heart attack. Heart disease is also a trigger for depression.

Depression and stress may have a negative impact on the immune system, making you more vulnerable to infections and diseases.

• Aging and depression. (n.d.). American Psychological Association. Retrieved June 30, 2014, from http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/aging-depression.aspx
• Depression and chronic pain. (n.d.). National Institute of Mental Health. Retrieved June 30, 2014, from http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/depression-and-chronic-pain/index.shtml
• Depression and heart disease: Mind and mood affect the heart. (2006, February). Harvard Health Publications, Harvard Medical School. Retrieved June 30, 2014, from http://www.health.harvard.edu/press_releases/depression_and_heart_disease
• Leonard, B. (2000, January 1). Stress, depression and the activation of the immune system. World J Biol Psychiatry. 1 (1), 17-25. Retrieved June 30, 2014, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12607229
• Muskin, P. (n.d.). How does depression affect someone's physical health and well-being?.Columbia University Medical Center, Columbia Psychiatry. Retrieved June 30, 2014, from: http://asp.cumc.columbia.edu/psych/asktheexperts/ask_the_experts_inquiry.asp?SI=72
• What is depression?. (n.d.). National Institute of Mental Health. Retrieved June 30, 2014, from https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/depression/index.shtml - part7

There’s always hope - brain tumour treatment breakthrough

This article was published on the HOPE Australia website on April 1, 2015.

To discourage or deny hope must be one of the cruelest things any one person can do to another.

Paul Russell

By Paul Russell, the director of HOPE Australia.

Euthanasia and assisted suicide enthusiasts peddle a wide range of slogans to further their goals and to influence the public towards the thought that perhaps being legally able to help someone to die or to kill them is a benefit both to the individual and to society at large.

That they should ‘sloganise’ their campaigns is entirely unremarkable; it’s what every organisation pushing for some change or some recognition would do. That their slogans are paper-thin veneers over precisely the opposite outcome is where the danger really lies.

Take for example the slogan of ‘choice’. This modern concept of ‘choice’ is closely aligned to autonomy – our right to self-determination and self-direction. Its use is beguiling precisely because ‘choice’ in general terms is prized as an integral part of freedom broadly understood.

However, in the context of euthanasia or assisted suicide, the ‘choice’ to be made dead is not really a choice at all; it is the end of choice precisely because it excludes all other possibilities in such a definite and irredeemable fashion. It excludes any and all other choices.

How many times have we heard stories of people who have ‘defied-the-odds’ and outlived a difficult prognosis by months and years and even experiencing remission to return to a full ‘normal’ life? There have even been cases of misdiagnosis resulting tragically in assisted suicide. Making the ‘choice’ to be dead denies any other possibility and extinguishes both life and hope.

Brittany Maynard had glioblastoma multiforme; a debilitating brain tumour that, in its final stages, grows at an alarming rate interfering with brain function and ultimately resulting in death. Medscape online notes that, ‘No current treatment is curative’.

Maynard ended her life using Oregon’s assisted suicide laws on the 1st of November last year. Maynard became the poster girl for the assisted suicide movement in the USA and even post-death is being used to promote assisted suicide across the Union and especially in her home state of California.

The use of people like Brittany Maynard to promote a cause like this is deeply disturbing. We will never know, at the end, how free a decision it was for her to suicide given the likelihood that her public profile and her announced intention to die at the end of October last sets a trajectory and an expectation.

The cancer treatment story begins at 13:30 on the youtube video.

What we can now say most clearly is that she did have other choices which she excluded by her death and which, according to the a US CBS Network Sixty Minutes report on the March 29, 2015, could possibly have included remission. 

In an extensive and beautifully constructed report, 60 Minutes’ anchor, Scott Pelley and a camera crew followed patients in a stage 1 immunotherapy trial on patients with glioblastoma reporting that the introduction of a variant of the polio virus into the tumour cells is acting to trigger the body’s immune system into attacking the tumour which, in early cases, has seen the tumour disappear completely over time.

Even Duke University’s head of the trial, in the report, says he is edging closer to the possibility of using the word ‘cure’.

While yet in the early stages of the trial process, tests on many other forms of cancer are returning favourable results.

This is great news. But as with all such medical breakthroughs, its announcement will come as ‘too late’ for some and will no doubt bring widely mixed emotions to those who have lost loved ones to this same form of tumour. Whether Brittany Maynard may have been able to access this trial is pure conjecture.

This breakthrough ultimately says to the euthanasia and assisted suicide argument that changing the law based on one individual’s circumstances at one solitary point in history is a denial of hope. It serves to highlight that the pro euthanasia and assisted suicide movement, in many subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways, is saying that this person (Maynard) and these persons (extending the individual to a category of persons) have no hope and, because of their circumstances, aren’t actually entitled to have any hope.

It’s not really about ‘choice’. It never was and never will be so. It’s really about the denial of life and of hope by the reduction of the human person to simply an object of pity and a victim of circumstance.

Hope, on the otherhand, can be a sustaining force even in the most difficult of circumstances. In the Sixty Minutes report they follow a mother of two who is hanging on to the hope that she will see her sons graduate, marry and then have her grandchildren. But even in seemingly bleak circumstances the hope of seeing another sunrise or another visit from a friend or loved one cannot be underestimated as a force to sustain equilibrium, joy and life.

To discourage or deny hope must be one of the cruelest things any one person can do to another short of killing them. Sugar coating it with the false mantra of choice makes it doubly so.

Please take the time to view the CBS two part video by clicking HERE.

Physician-Assisted Suicide: Improving the Debate

This article was first published on the Ethikapolitika website

Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is in the news … again.

John Keown

By John Keown

The Washington Post reported on Valentine’s day that since the death of her husband, Diane Rehm, the NPR talk show host, is emerging as a “key force” in the “right to die” debate. The Post relates that she is addressing fundraising dinners for “Compassion and Choices,” a pro-PAS pressure-group. The Post quotes her as saying:

As strongly as I feel, I don’t want to use the program to proselytize my feelings … But I do want to have more and more discussion about it because I feel it’s so important.

She is right. It is important. And it is worthy of more discussion, not least because more discussion, if fair and balanced, allows opponents of PAS to refute the superficially attractive arguments of pressure-groups like “Compassion and Choices”—arguments that have, with very few exceptions, been rejected by legislatures, expert committees, courts, professional healthcare associations, and disability groups around the world.

What are the main arguments for changing the law to allow doctors, at the patient’s request, to write a lethal prescription (PAS) or to administer a lethal injection (voluntary, active euthanasia, or VAE)? In Debating Euthanasia, a book in which I debate a leading advocate of PAS and VAE, I considered ten arguments for relaxing the law. To illustrate their weakness, let us consider just three of the most popular arguments.

First: choice. Doesn’t respect for autonomy mean that patients have a right to be assisted in suicide, or to be given a lethal injection, if they make a truly autonomous request?

No. Respect for autonomy is important. We have, for example, a right to refuse treatment. We might judge that some treatments would not offer us a reasonable hope of benefit, or that others would be too burdensome to us. But respect for autonomy is not absolute. It has limits. One limit is on choices that seriously undermine the individual’s worth or well-being. We do not, for example, allow people to sell themselves into slavery. (And while one can sometimes escape from slavery, there is no return from death.) Nor do we allow people to take hard drugs. Even driving without a seatbelt is generally prohibited. It is often countered that suicide has been widely decriminalized. This is true, but the aim of decriminalization was, by removing the threat and stigma of punishment, to encourage suicidal people to seek psychiatric help. It was not to condone suicide, which is precisely why the prohibition on assisting suicide was retained.

Moreover, if the law were relaxed, how many requests for PAS or VAE would be truly autonomous, truly free, informed and considered, and how many the result of depression, or a sense of being worthless or a burden, or pressure from relatives, or inability to afford medical treatment?

Shocking! New Hampshire State representative offers euthanasia as a solution to the state budget.

By Alex Schadenberg
International Chair - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

New Hampshire State representative, Michael Cahill (Dem) offered euthanasia as a solution during the budget debate last week. Cahill stated:

"Since we are refusing to raise revenues to fund services for the disabled, for example, have you looked at euthanasia?"

The chair responded:

"The member is out-of-order. The question is not appropriate. The member will be seated."

Cahill may be making a point related to budget cuts. Watch the youtube video below. 

In September 2008, Baroness Warnock, (UK) stated that people with dementia had a duty to die.

In the book, Freedom to Die, (1998) Derek Humphry, co-founder of the Hemlock Society, now known as Compassion & Choices, and Mary Clement stated (page 313):

 “In the final analysis, economics, not the quest for broadened individual liberties or increased autonomy, will drive assisted suicide to the plateau of acceptable practice.”

Legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide will be abused and will lead to a duty to die for people at the most vulnerable time of their life.

Euthanasia and assisted suicide is not about caring, it is about killing.

Always Care, Never Kill: How Physician-Assisted Suicide Endangers the Weak, Corrupts Medicine, Compromises the Family, and Violates Human Dignity and Equality

This research article was published by the Heritage Foundation on March 24, 2015.

Ryan Anderson

By Ryan T Anderson PhD

Abstract

Allowing physician-assisted suicide would be a grave mistake for four reasons. First, it would endanger the weak and vulnerable. Second, it would corrupt the practice of medicine and the doctor–patient relationship. Third, it would compromise the family and intergenerational commitments. And fourth, it would betray human dignity and equality before the law. Instead of helping people to kill themselves, we should offer them appropriate medical care and human presence. We should respond to suffering with true compassion and solidarity. Doctors should help their patients to die a dignified death of natural causes, not assist in killing. Physicians are always to care, never to kill.

The Hippocratic Oath proclaims: “I will keep [the sick] from harm and injustice. I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect.”[1] This is an essential precept for a flourishing civil society. No one, especially a doctor, should be permitted to kill intentionally, or assist in killing intentionally, an innocent neighbor.

Human life need not be extended by every medical means possible, but a person should never be intentionally killed. Doctors may help their patients to die a dignified death from natural causes, but they should not kill their patients or help them to kill themselves. This is the reality that such euphemisms as “death with dignity” and “aid in dying” seek to conceal.

In 2015, at least 18 state legislatures and the District of Columbia are considering whether to allow physician-assisted suicide (PAS).[2] Legalizing physician-assisted suicide, however, would be a grave mistake because it would:

• Endanger the weak and vulnerable,
• Corrupt the practice of medicine and the doctor–patient relationship,
• Compromise the family and intergenerational commitments, and
• Betray human dignity and equality before the law.

First, PAS endangers the weak and marginalized in society. Where it has been allowed, safeguards purporting to minimize this risk have proved to be inadequate and have often been watered down or eliminated over time. People who deserve society’s assistance are instead offered accelerated death.

Second, PAS changes the culture in which medicine is practiced. It corrupts the profession of medicine by permitting the tools of healing to be used as techniques for killing. By the same token, PAS threatens to fundamentally distort the doctor–patient relationship because it reduces patients’ trust of doctors and doctors’ undivided commitment to the life and health of their patients. Moreover, the option of PAS would provide perverse incentives for insurance providers and the public and private financing of health care. Physician-assisted suicide offers a cheap, quick fix in a world of increasingly scarce health care resources.

Third, PAS would harm our entire culture, especially our family and intergenerational obligations. The temptation to view elderly or disabled family members as burdens will increase, as will the temptation for those family members to internalize this attitude and view themselves as burdens. Physician-assisted suicide undermines social solidarity and true compassion.

Fourth, PAS’s most profound injustice is that it violates human dignity and denies equality before the law. Every human being has intrinsic dignity and immeasurable worth. For our legal system to be coherent and just, the law must respect this dignity in everyone. It does so by taking all reasonable steps to prevent the innocent, of any age or condition, from being devalued and killed. Classifying a subgroup of people as legally eligible to be killed violates our nation’s commitment to equality before the law—showing profound disrespect for and callousness to those who will be judged to have lives no longer “worth living,” not least the frail elderly, the demented, and the disabled. No natural right to PAS exists, and arguments for such a right are incoherent: A legal system that allows assisted suicide abandons the natural right to life of all its citizens.

Instead of embracing PAS, we should respond to suffering with true compassion and solidarity. People seeking PAS typically suffer from depression or other mental illnesses, as well as simply from loneliness. Instead of helping them to kill themselves, we should offer them appropriate medical care and human presence. For those in physical pain, pain management and other palliative medicine can manage their symptoms effectively. For those for whom death is imminent, hospice care and fellowship can accompany them in their last days. Anything less falls short of what human dignity requires. The real challenge facing society is to make quality end-of-life care available to all.

Doctors should help their patients to die a dignified death of natural causes, not assist in killing. Physicians are always to care, never to kill. They properly seek to alleviate suffering, and it is reasonable to withhold or withdraw medical interventions that are not worthwhile. However, to judge that a patient’s life is not worthwhile and deliberately hasten his or her end is another thing altogether.

Citizens and policymakers need to resist the push by pressure groups, academic elites, and the media to sanction PAS. Recent experience with PAS both in the United States and in Europe suggests how problematic it is.

Endangering the Weak and Marginalized

To understand how PAS endangers the weak and marginalized, one must understand what PAS entails and where it leads. With PAS, a doctor prescribes the deadly drug, but the patient self-administers it. While most activists in the United States publicly call only for PAS, they have historically advocated not only PAS, but also euthanasia: the intentional killing of the patient by a doctor.

This is not surprising: The arguments for PAS are equally arguments for euthanasia. Neil Gorsuch, currently a federal judge, points out that some contemporary activists fault the movement for not being honest about where its arguments lead. He notes that legal theorist and New York University School of Law Professor Richard Epstein “has charged his fellow assisted suicide advocates who fail to endorse the legalization of euthanasia openly and explicitly with a ‘certain lack of courage.’”[3]

The logic of assisted suicide leads to euthanasia because if “compassion” demands that some patients be helped to kill themselves, it makes little sense to claim that only those who are capable of self-administering the deadly drugs be given this option. Should not those who are too disabled to kill themselves have their suffering ended by a lethal injection?

And what of those who are too disabled to request that their suffering be ended, such as infants or the demented? Why should they be denied the “benefit” of a hastened death? Does not “compassion” provide an even more compelling reason for a doctor to provide this release from suffering and indignity?[4] As Professor John Keown points out:

If compassion justified us in giving a lethal prescription to a terminally ill patient on request to end their suffering, it would equally justify us in giving them a lethal injection, particularly if they were physically unable to commit suicide. It would also justify us in giving a lethal injection to a terminally ill patient who was incapable of making a request.[5]

Judge Gorsuch notes that for the Dutch, “it is the physician’s assessment of the patient’s quality of life as ‘degrading’ or ‘deteriorating’ or ‘hopeless’ that stands as the ultimate justification for killing.”[6]

Although the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled in two unanimous decisions that there is no constitutional right to PAS, three states permit it by statute: Oregon, Washington, and Vermont.[7] Physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia are allowed in three European countries—the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg—and Switzerland allows assisted suicide.[8]

The evidence from these jurisdictions, particularly the Netherlands, which has over 30 years of experience, suggests that safeguards to ensure effective control have proved inadequate. In the Netherlands, several official, government-sponsored surveys have disclosed both that in thousands of cases, doctors have intentionally administered lethal injections to patients without a request and that in thousands of cases, they have failed to report cases to the authorities.[9]

The Cruelty of Terri Schiavo’s Death.

This article was published by Wesley Smith on his blog on March 31, 2015.

Wesley Smith

By Wesley Smith

During the Terri Schiavo debacle, I would often debate bioethicists and others who claimed that Terri’s death would be gentle. 

These advocates either intentionally or ignorantly conflated two different circumstances.

1. The first, taking food and water from someone whose body readily assimilated sustenance. That is an agonizing death. 
2. The second, people dying naturally whose bodies are shutting down. In such circumstances, people stop eating and drinking on their own as part of the process of passing on. That does not cause suffering, and indeed, it is medically inappropriate–and can be cruel–to force sustenance into their bodies.

Terri was a number 1, and the advocates pretended she was a number 2.

Now Terri’s brother frankly discusses the terrible circumstances of his sister’s slow death by dehydration. He had an artist depict what she actually looked like. From, “I Will Never Forget the Look of Horror…” 

These are the hard facts my family and I will have to live with for the rest of my life:  

After almost two weeks without food or water, my sister’s lips were horribly cracked, to the point where they were blistering.  

Her skin became jaundiced with areas that turned different shades of blue. Her skin became markedly dehydrated from the lack of water. Terri’s breathing became rapid and uncontrollable, as if she was outside sprinting.  

Her moaning, at times, was raucous, which indicated to us the insufferable pain she was experiencing. Terri’s face became skeletal, with blood pooling in her deeply sunken eyes and her teeth protruding forward.  

Even as I write this, I can never properly describe the nightmare of having to watch my sister have to die this way. What will be forever seared in my memory is the look of utter horror on my sister’s face when my family visited her just after she died. 

The process Bobby describes is exactly what the late, pro-dehydration neurologist Dr. Ron Cranford testified happens to those being dehydrated in the Robert Wendland case. From my, “A Painless Death?” in the Weekly Standard quoting a court transcript: