Physician Assisted Suicide

"No person who is suffering is a problem to be solved. They're a person to be loved." -Rev Paul R. Smith

I-1000 is a proposed initiative to legalize physician assisted suicide in the state of Washington.


Part One Death with Dignity: A Dangerous Deception


Part Two Death with Dignity: A Dangerous Deception

Assisted suicide. It would be hard to argue with the fact that anyone receiving the news that s/he had a terminal illness would be depressed. One cannot deny that depression would play a major role in one's choice to commit suicide. When doctors begin setting a precedent of assisted depressed people in committing suicide, can you imagine the consequences for depressed people everywhere?

Looking at assisted suicide, we can see how such a legalized action would create a feeling of a duty to die for those with illnesses, as well as the feeling by the rest of us that those with terminal illnesses have a duty to die. In Oregon's first years with legalized physician assisted suicide, a large number of people who committed suicide did so out of fear of becoming a burden to their family. With limited financial resources, or at least claims of limited financial resources, the rest of us might indeed feel that those who were 'dying anyway' had a duty to die, especially if the person is old or poor or has a severe cognitive disability. The kind of people who have 'used their share' of public or private health care, the kind of people we deem to have a 'low quality of life', after all.

Another factor in a person choosing suicide is a fear of disability. In the first two years of Oregon's assisted suicide law, those who committed suicide did so out of fear of being unable to pursue enjoyable life activities, fear of needing personal assistance with daily living, and worries about being a burden on their families. Disability Rights activist Paul Longmore spoke about this aspect of Oregon's experience:

Fear of disability typically underlies assisted suicide... The advocates play on that horror of "dependency." ...If needing help is undignified and death is better than dependency, there is no reason to deny assisted suicide to people who will have to put up with it for six or sixteen years, rather than just six months. Not that we favor assisted suicide if it is limited to terminally ill people. We simply want to ask, has this country gotten to the point that we will abet suicide because people can't wipe their own behinds?

Lastly, physician assisted suicide will lead to euthanasia. After all, what about those with disabilities who can't take their lethal prescription on their own? Isn't that discrimination? They'll need someone to feed the pills to them. Once we become accustomed to the idea of physicians practicing death, we will begin to tolerate more extreme versions, more extreme that a doctor 'simply' assisting a person who is dying, more than a physician who is providing a 'good death' to people who can't do it themselves. How far could this go?

From the Coalation Against Assisted Suicide's website:

"Pressure for improved palliative care appears to have evaporated [in the Netherlands]," according to Herbert Hendin, M.D. Dr. Hendin is a Director of Suicide Prevention International and was formerly the Medical Director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

"Over the past two decades," Hendin continued, "the Netherlands has moved from assisted suicide to euthanasia, from euthanasia for the terminally ill to euthanasia for the chronically ill, from euthanasia for physical illness to euthanasia for psychological distress and from voluntary euthanasia to nonvoluntary and involuntary euthanasia.

"Once the Dutch accepted assisted suicide it was not possible legally or morally to deny more active medical (assistance to die), i.e. euthanasia, to those who could not effect their own deaths. Nor could they deny assisted suicide or euthanasia to the chronically ill who have longer to suffer than the terminally ill or to those who have psychological pain not associated with physical disease. To do so would be a form of discrimination.

Involuntary euthanasia has been justified as necessitated by the need to make decisions for patients not [medically] competent to choose for themselves."

Doctors can help people in severe pain due to a terminal illness with palliative care. The rest of can meet the need of someone alone with the fear of being abandoned in their illness, in their fear of being a 'burden'. Though we don't do it well, right now. How else could something like physician assisted suicide gain so much popularity?

There are other options besides sanctioning the suicide of people dying.

For more information, visit the Coalition Against Assisted Suicide at http://noassistedsuicide.com/.