Tag Archives: assisted suicide

Honolulu Civil Beat: 5 Reasons to Oppose Assisted Suicide

Hospital bed assisted suicide

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.

No. 1

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).

Washington v. Glucksberg, and Vacco v. Quill

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Duluth News Tribune: Doctor Says Legalizing Assisted Suicide Undermines Health Care

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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.”

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Star-Tribune: Legalizing Assisted Suicide No Answer for People with Disabilities Like Me

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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.

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Orlando Sentinel: In Doctor-Assisted Suicide Neutrality is Not an Option

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Source: Orlando Sentinel

By Dr. Frederick J. White

While deeply committed to effective relief of the pain and suffering of the terminally ill, the American Medical Association has long held a position that I share — that physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia are “fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.”

But now the AMA is studying whether to retreat from that position into the mirage of moral neutrality. State medical societies in Colorado and Maryland have recently done so, abandoning authority, agency, principle and position in one fell swoop. But the wink and nod of neutrality is beneath the demands of this issue and the dignity of the medical profession.

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RecordonLine.com: Give Us Better Care for the Living, Not Assisted Suicide

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Source: RecordonLine.com

By J. J. Hanson, President, Patients Rights Action Fund

Assisted suicide bills have been failing consistently in progressive states like New York, Massachusetts, Maryland and Connecticut. New Yorkers are seeing through the euphemisms and misinformation of proponents. Articles like Bonnie Kraham’s call what Jack Kevorkian did “care.” Assisted suicide proponents claim that this is only for the terminally ill. Seventy-five percent of Kevorkian’s 69 victims were not terminally ill and five of them had no physical ailment whatsoever.

Regardless of a person’s health or disability status, suicide is always a tragedy and when a doctor prescribes an overdose of 100 pills paid for by insurance it’s not medical care.

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