Author Archives: Maria

“Terminal” Can Mean Life Left to Live

JJ Hanson & family

Source: Boston Herald

By: J.J. Hanson

Proponents of assisted suicide are turning up the pressure in many states to legalize the dangerous practice. What began in a few places, has become an onslaught of bills introduced — 29 states this year alone. Fortunately most have been defeated. Now assisted-suicide proponents have their set their sights on Massachusetts.

Legalizing assisted suicide would destroy essential protections and care that patients like me depend on as we continue to fight life-threatening illnesses.

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Momentum Shift Against Doctor-Prescribed Suicide

Not Dead Yet

Source: Washington Examiner 

By: J.J. Hanson

Momentum is finally shifting against the legalization and expansion of assisted suicide. Twenty-three states have rejected bills attempting to legalize assisted suicide since the beginning of 2017, and these bills are now considered dead for the remainder of the year.

Why such unusual bipartisan consensus? In our profit-driven healthcare system, where care is expensive and assisted suicide is cheap, patients with terminal illnesses, people with disabilities, the elderly, and the poor are in grave danger of being pushed towards a death-too-soon. Assisted suicide policy injects government bodies and insurance companies with financial incentives into every single person’s end of life decisions.

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Assisted Suicide: Dying of Despair

Elderly holding hands

Source: National Review

By Wesley J. Smith

I began my work against assisted suicide in 1993. In the intervening years, I have witnessed a very disturbing change. When I began, the emotional zeitgeist of society focused intensely on preventing suicide. Today, in many cases, the emotional oomph (if you will) supports suicide, not in all cases to be sure, but certainly in some.
There has been a concomitant downgrading of suicide prevention intensity. As I wrote a few years ago, we now have what I call “invisible” suicide prevention campaigns.

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Assisted Suicide Puts People with Disabilities at Risk

Assisted suicide 2

Source: Not Dead Yet

By Carol Cleigh Sutton

The very heart of the argument for assisted suicide/euthanasia (AS/E) is that an individual may be better off dead than disabled.

The fact that this argument can be made in respectable public forums demonstrates just how ableist this society is. How deeply the severely abled fear and loathe those of us who live with disability.

Ableism, like racism and sexism, is an ugly prejudice that society holds towards its minority members.

What does ableism look like? First you exclude us from nearly all public life and especially gainful employment and instead put us ‘on the dole.’ Then, periodically, you cut those supports from under us or make us try to prove that we’re ‘worthy’ of such supports. You openly stare at us and your comments and prurient questions make public spaces hostile. If we object, you accuse us of being maladjusted or just not being able to take a joke. A disabled man in the Netherlands is constantly told that it is ‘his fault’ that he lives with a disability; after all, he could kill himself. Where AS/E has become the norm, disabled people are even more outcast.

Our lives are seen as not worth living, but these are the lives we have.

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Why Are Women with Disabilities Offered Assisted Suicide, Rather than a Chance to Live?

Woman with arms raised celebrates her achievement and success in the sunshine even with her disabilities in a wheelchair.

Woman with arms raised celebrates her achievement and success in the sunshine even with her disabilities in a wheelchair.

Source: Rabble.ca

By: Carmela Hutchison

People with disabilities and their caregivers are at risk for being made to say yes to medical assistance in dying when they don’t want to.

On July 24, 2017, CBC reported a story about a 25-year-old woman living in Newfoundland who has many disabilities. While she was hospitalized for illness, the doctor made a suggestion to her mother that she could consider medical assistance in dying (MAiD) as a choice for her daughter’s future. Her mother was reminded that assisted suicide is now legal in Canada.

Just over a year ago, the federal government passed a law allowing medical assistance in dying, after the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the ban on assisted suicide.

The disability community was gravely concerned about the medical assistance in dying law. The Newfoundland case is exactly the kind of situation many of us were afraid would happen.

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