This website does not accept contributions. The Vermont citizens who founded it and maintain it pay its expenses, which are few. If you can possibly give to help fight assisted suicide in Vermont, Vermont Alliance for Ethical Health Care, an organization of in-state health care professionals fighting the legalization of assisted suicide, does need and accept donations. Vermont Alliance for Ethical Health Care will use your donations to run tv and radio ads in our state giving accurate information to citizens. It will use them to provide accurate information on the dangers of assisted suicide to our state legislators. Send non-tax-deductible donations to Vermont Alliance for Ethical Healthcare at the following address:
P.O. Box 2145
South Burlington, VT 05407-2145
On the other hand, do not give a penny to the organization soliciting donations with the words quoted below. We copied them directly from the website of Death with Dignity, a national group with international ties and a political arm that defines its mission as “defense of the Oregon (assisted suicide ) law and the promotion of death with dignity initiatives in other states.” Get ready. Here are the amazingly misguided words:
If you’d like to help Vermonters learn more about their proposed Death with Dignity bill, please consider making a non tax-deductible, political donation to the Death with Dignity Political Action Fund today! 100% of your contribution will go directly to the Vermont effort.
The very use of the term “death with dignity” is evidence that this group’s information is not accurate. What it is promoting in Vermont is assisted suicide. Webster’s online dictionary defines suicide as “the act or an instance of taking one’s own life voluntarily and intentionally especially by a person of years of discretion and of sound mind”. This is a group that engages in deceptive manipulation of language, though perhaps with the intent of self-deception as much or more than deception of others.
A recent article by lawyer Margaret Dore in the Vermont Bar Journal exposed the loopholes allowing for abuse of assisted suicide bills like the one now stuck in a committee of the VT legislature. In so doing it made it clear that the bill’s backers’ insistence that it is about choice is an illusion(http://www.vtbar.org/Images/Journal/journalarticles/winter2011/PhysicianAssistedSuicide.pdf). The amazing thing about the quote, however, is not its wordplay, which we expected, but the lack of understanding of our state. Vermonters prefer to take care of their own people and make their own laws! We will not be controlled by out of staters with an agenda they want to impose on us!
In the short time since the beginning of this year, Death with Dignity-sponsored efforts to legalize assisted suicide have failed in Hawaii, Montana and New Hampshire. Idaho has made assisting in a suicide a felony punishable by 5 years in prison.
Vermont is the only target the advocates of assisted suicide have left, and they are putting all their efforts and money here,despite the fact that they have tried and failed to legalize assisted suicide in Vermont seven times already. According to an Associated Press article published in the Burlington Free Press (http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20110220/NEWS03/110220012/-Death-with-dignity-debate-likely-to-be-emotional), the national organization has pledged to spend $100,000 on efforts to legalize assisted suicide in Vermont, to supplement the funds the in-state organization is able to raise by itself.
Here is how the money is being used. During the first week in March, an Oregon activist flew in to speak at forums around the state. The national Death with Dignity website describes the speaking tour as a success We agree that it was a success; but the success was for us, the opponents of assisted suicide!
While rejecting every argument they made, we salute the pro assisted suicide speakers for their civility. The truth is that they were confronted at every meeting with a sea of people wearing yellow stickers saying, “I oppose physician assisted suicide” or “I oppose doctor prescribed death,” messages that not only expressed opposition but spoke the truth. They were also confronted with lots of questions and well-informed statements from people described by the Bennington Banner as “mostly polite” but with minds “already made up”. There were a very few remarks made on both sides that we wish we hadn’t heard, but in general we were proud of Vermonters.
The proponents of assisted suicide tried to win converts by appealing to the independent spirit of Vermonters, but Vermonters are truly independent thinkers. The more information they have about assisted suicide and about Death with Dignity’s agenda, the more they reject efforts to cloak the reality of assisted suicide in soothing redefinitions like “death with dignity”. People stood up at the meeting we attended and read Webster’s Dictionary’s definition of “suicide” aloud. What you are asking us to approve is suicide, they said, and we do not want our doctors aiding and abetting suicide! We want them doing what they are supposed to do: treating people’s pain and thus preventing suicide, making it possible for people to live with true choice and true dignity.
Please donate to Vermont Alliance for Ethical Health Care!