Read the comments as well as this excellent blog post against assisted suicide. Why do those who do not tolerate the stereotyping of people of color or women so easily and unthinkingly make and state judgments that the lives of people with disabilities and old people as not worthy of support? These people's lives are already endangered, and legal assisted suicide will … [Read more...] about More on Prejudice and Presumption about the Value of Life with Disability
Minds Change: Another Palliative Care Physician Explains His Opposition to Assisted Suicide
In this article a palliative care physician reports from experience about how patients' wishes for assisted suicide are often transient and how doctors cannot be certain what treatments or life events influence them to change their minds and want to live. A patient with a doctor-prescribed lethal dose in his or her possession may commit suicide on one of the days he wants to … [Read more...] about Minds Change: Another Palliative Care Physician Explains His Opposition to Assisted Suicide
As Washington Suicide Rate Increases, TV Station Runs Spot Romanticizing Assisted Suicide
After the legal wrangling was over, all appeals had failed, and Oregon's assisted suicide law began to result in reported deaths in 1999, the rate of non-assisted suicides in the state, which had been declining for a decade, immediately began to rise. It has continued to do so. In 2010 it was 35% over the national average … [Read more...] about As Washington Suicide Rate Increases, TV Station Runs Spot Romanticizing Assisted Suicide
No Capital Punishment Belgium to Euthanize, Not Treat, Prisoner
This leaves us nearly speechless. Here in the US, where many states execute murderers by lethal injection, there have been incidences in which the drugs have failed, causing great suffering and a prolonged death. Many in the US are calling for an end to executions using drugs that do not always work in the ways they were intended to. Belgium has no capital punishment, … [Read more...] about No Capital Punishment Belgium to Euthanize, Not Treat, Prisoner
Letter to the Burlington Free Press: Assisted Suicide Law is Not Working, Should Be Repealed
Somehow we missed this good letter when it appeared in the Burlington Free Press last June. How can anyone say the law is working well when it hasn't been used at all and when we don't know where the lethal drugs that were obtained but not ingested are? Unlike some earlier versions of the bill that were defeated, Act 39 does not make any provisions at all for safe disposal … [Read more...] about Letter to the Burlington Free Press: Assisted Suicide Law is Not Working, Should Be Repealed