Tag Archives: assisted suicide

The Dangers of Allowing Assisted Suicide

JJ Hanson & family

 

By Kristen Hanson

Source: HudsonValleyOne.com

Assemblyman Kevin Cahill did well when he voted against previous bills to legalize assisted suicide in New York. Assisted suicide bills are inherently discriminatory and they make for dangerous public policy that puts a great number of vulnerable people at risk of deadly harm through mistakes, abuse and coercion.

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Physician Assisted Suicide is Dangerous for Everyone

Pills

 

Source: PennLive.com

By Karl Benzio, M.D.

Being a psychiatrist for 30 years, I’ve successfully cared for thousands of patients, many critically or terminally ill throughout the United States and experiencing severe trauma in Uganda and Iraq. I see desperate people with unimaginable pain and realize contemplating suicide is complex and never occurs lightly.

But, allowing anyone, especially doctors, to help kill a person, is dangerous to patients, doctors, the healthcare system, and society, especially when much better and safer options exist. The real solution needs to combine proper expertise with true compassion.

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5 Myths About Legalizing Assisted Suicide

Elderly hands

Source: Syracuse.com

By Stephanie Woodward

In 2019, the New York Legislature will once again consider a bill to permit healthcare providers to give lethal prescriptions to adults who are deemed terminally ill and ask to die. Despite lack of success in the past, proponents will use myths in arguing that legalizing assisted suicide enhances patient choice without compromising patient safety.

Myth #1 is that the bill concerns “aid in dying” and “end of life options” rather than enabling suicide. These are marketing terms. As Dr. Ira Byock, a palliative care specialist has written, “’aid in dying’ makes it sound like giving someone a lethal drug is an extension of hospice and palliative care. It is not.” New York’s highest court has drawn a sharp distinction between a patient deciding when not to have life-prolonging treatment and a doctor actively prescribing lethal drugs for the purpose of directly causing the patient’s death. If the latter was a medical practice, as proponents have stated, there would be no reason for laws to immunize medical professionals from what would otherwise be unlawful behavior, i.e. assisting and abetting suicides.

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Hopkins Doctor: Assisted Suicide is Unethical and Dangerous

Elderly holding hands

 

By: Joseph Marine

Source: Baltimore Sun

For the past five years, advocates of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) have tried and failed to pass legislation that legalizes the practice in Maryland. Proponents of PAS are back again with the same dangerous, unethical, discriminatory, unnecessary and hopelessly flawed bill. As a physician who has been in practice for almost 20 years and has treated thousands of patients in all conditions of life, I urge the legislature and the citizens of Maryland to continue to reject it for many reasons.

PAS, also euphemistically termed “aid-in-dying,” refers to the prescribing of a non-FDA approved lethal overdose of a drug or combination of drugs to a person believed to have a terminal illness. PAS is unethical. It is specifically prohibited by the Hippocratic Oath and opposed by the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, the American Nurses Association, the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and the World Medical Association.

PAS is not medical care. It has no basis in medical science or medical tradition. It is not taught in medical schools or residency training programs. The drug concoctions used to end patients’ lives with PAS come from the euthanasia movement and not from the medical profession or medical research.

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Candy Coating Assisted Suicide

elderly by the sea

By: T. Brian Callister

Source: Las Vegas Review-Journal

As a practicing physician and medical school professor with more than 30 years of experience, I know firsthand that hospice and palliative care are wonderful and underutilized resources for the terminally and chronically ill. One should also note that refusing medical interventions and medications at the end of life is both a reasonable and ethical option at times.

On the other hand, physician-assisted suicide — which could be on the agenda during Nevada’s current legislative session and is now being referred to by the candy-coated label “medical-aid-in-dying” — is an ethically absurd and morally corrupt intervention. It is overt killing at its very core.

First and foremost, physician-assisted suicide (PAS) creates perverse incentives to prematurely kill, not to just “aid in dying.” It also turns the physician into a complicit partner in this outright killing.

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