Source: Reno Gazette-Journal
By Dr. Kirk Bronander
In the past 20 years, more than 175 state campaigns to legalize assisted suicide have been introduced. Most have failed and continue to fail, even in some of the most progressive states across the country. As a physician, I see assisted suicide as an unnecessary policy that harms rather than helps patients.
Source: Not Dead Yet
By: Anita Cameron
A few weeks ago, I went to Albany, the New York state capital, to meet with members of the Senate Minority Caucus to urge them not to support any forthcoming assisted suicide legislation.
During the meetings, each legislator and/or staffer was asked had he or she heard stances against assisted suicide from the perspective of disabled people. With one exception, no one said they had heard why many in our community are against it.
As I spoke with other folks with disabilities around the country, the same theme arose — they were speaking out against assisted suicide and they weren’t really being heard.
Source: Honolulu Civil Beat
By: Dr. Glenn M.L. Pang
I read your proposal that the Legislature push physician-assisted suicide and would like to share five reasons that I, as a long-time Honolulu physician, believe doing so would ultimately bring regret to Hawaii.
The Supreme Court has asserted that “the asserted ‘right’ to assistance in committing suicide is not a fundamental liberty interest protected by the due process clause.” (U.S. Supreme Court Majority Opinion 6/26, 1997).
By Steven C. Bergeson on December 21, 2016
Assisted suicide is picking up steam. Colorado and Washington, D.C., legalized the practice this fall, joining four other states where it already was legally permissible for physicians to prescribe lethal dosages to eligible patients.
Assisted suicide’s next stop? It could be Minnesota. In March, a bill to legalize the practice was introduced in our state Senate’s Health, Human Services and Housing Committee. It didn’t make it out of committee, but its proponents promised to be back.
As a doctor who has devoted my life to providing care and healing, I bristle at the possibility of practicing medicine in a state where assisting in someone’s suicide could be considered “health care.” Not only is assisted suicide not authentic health care, it actually undermines the ethical norm at the heart of the medical profession — the Hippocratic oath, which transformed medicine into an art of healing, dedicated to caring about the patient’s interests rather than the interests of others. Everyone knows doctors are taught to “first do no harm.”
Source: Star-Tribune
By Jean Swenson
“I’d rather be dead than disabled.”
I remember feeling that way several months before I became severely disabled. In 1980, I had taken a group of teenage girls to see a young quadriplegic named Joni Eareckson Tada, who painted beautifully by holding a paintbrush in her mouth. Though inspired by her talent, I remember telling the girls, “I could never live like that.”
A few months later my neck was broken in a car accident, and I became a quadriplegic, paralyzed below my shoulders. I would spend the next year and a half in various hospitals and rehabilitation centers, dealing with medical problems and learning to live with a spinal cord injury.