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The Metal Reviews Debate: Assisted Suicide
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Author:  Cú Chulainn [ Sat Feb 21, 2009 12:50 pm ]
Post subject:  The Metal Reviews Debate: Assisted Suicide
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/pers ... o-die.html

I was reading this column with a sense of and and then I saw the final line and felt less surprised!

'Right to die' can become a 'duty to die'
Vulnerable people can be bullied into assisted suicide, believes Wesley Smith.

By Wesley Smith
Last Updated: 8:27AM GMT 21 Feb 2009

Comments 1 | Comment on this article

Imagine that you have lung cancer. It has been in remission, but tests show the cancer has returned and is likely to be terminal. Still, there is some hope. Chemotherapy could extend your life, if not save it. You ask to begin treatment. But you soon receive more devastating news. A letter from the government informs you that the cost of chemotherapy is deemed an unjustified expense for the limited extra time it would provide. However, the government is not without compassion. You are informed that whenever you are ready, it will gladly pay for your assisted suicide.

Think that's an alarmist scenario to scare you away from supporting "death with dignity"? Wrong. That is exactly what happened last year to two cancer patients in Oregon, where assisted suicide is legal.

Barbara Wagner had recurrent lung cancer and Randy Stroup had prostate cancer. Both were on Medicaid, the state's health insurance plan for the poor that, like some NHS services, is rationed. The state denied both treatment, but told them it would pay for their assisted suicide. "It dropped my chin to the floor," Stroup told the media. "[How could they] not pay for medication that would help my life, and yet offer to pay to end my life?" (Wagner eventually received free medication from the drug manufacturer. She has since died. The denial of chemotherapy to Stroup was reversed on appeal after his story hit the media.)

Despite Wagner and Stroup's cases, advocates continue to insist that Oregon proves assisted suicide can be legalised with no abuses. But the more one learns about the actual experience, the shakier such assurances become.

At a meeting in the House of Commons on Monday night hosted by the anti-euthanasia charity Alert and Labour MP Brian Iddon, I hope to bring home to MPs and the British public just how dangerous it would be to legalise euthanasia. The Oregon experiment shows how easily the "right to die" can become a "duty to die" for vulnerable and depressed people fearful of becoming a burden on the state or their relatives. I know that a powerful and emotive campaign is being waged in the UK media – using heart-rending cases such as multiple sclerosis sufferer Debbie Purdy – to inveigle Parliament into changing the law.

Miss Purdy, who lost in the Appeal Court on Thursday, wants to secure a legal guarantee that her husband would not be prosecuted if he accompanied her to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland – one of the few places where euthanasia is legal. Much as I sympathise with her plight, such a guarantee would lure us on to the slippery slope where the old and the sick come under pressure to end their lives.

A study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine last year, for example, found that doctors in Oregon write lethal prescriptions for patients who are not experiencing significant symptoms and that assisted suicide practice has had little do with any inability to alleviate pain – the fear of which is a chief selling point for legalisation.

The report said that family members described loved ones who pursue "physician-assisted death" as individuals for whom being in control is important, who anticipate the negative aspects of dying and who believe the impending loss of self and quality of life will be intolerable. They fear becoming a burden to others, yet want to die at home. Concerns about what may be experienced in the future were substantially more powerful reasons than what they experienced at that point in time.

When a scared and depressed patient asks for poison pills and their doctor's response is to pull out the lethal prescription pad, it confirms the patient's worst fears – that they are a burden, that they are less worth loving. Hospices are geared to address such concerns. But effective hospice care is undermined when a badly needed mental health intervention is easily avoided via a state-sanctioned, physician-prescribed overdose of lethal pills.

Do the guidelines protect depressed people in Oregon? Hardly. The law does not require treatment when depression is suspected, and very few terminal patients who ask for assisted suicide are referred for psychiatric consultations. In 2008 not one patient who received a lethal prescription was referred by the prescribing doctor for a mental health evaluation.

As palliative care physician Dr Kathleen Foley and psychiatrist Herbert Hendin, an expert on suicide prevention, wrote in a scathing exposé of Oregon assisted suicide, physicians are able to "assist in suicide without inquiring into the source of the medical, psychological, social and existential concerns that usually underlie requests … even though this type of inquiring produces the kind of discussion that often leads to relief for patients and makes assisted suicide seem unnecessary."

Oregon has become the model for how assisted suicide is supposed to work. But for those who dig beneath the sloganeering and feel-good propaganda, it becomes clear that legalising assisted suicide leads to abandonment, bad medical practice and a disregard for the importance of patients' lives.

Wesley Smith is a lawyer, associate director of the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.


Where do you stand on assisted suicide?
Author:  Azrael [ Sat Feb 21, 2009 2:10 pm ]
Post subject: 
admittedly i had never seen the issue from this point of view. i had always seen it as people who always had both options, assisted suicide or to keep on living, regardless of the economic burden.

i see the slippery slope but this isn't enough to make me change my opinion that assisted suicide should be made legal, but tightly regulated.
Author:  traptunderice [ Sat Feb 21, 2009 2:25 pm ]
Post subject: 
I usually take the cynical, disgusting standpoint of there are so many people start off-ing them all but I'm going to ponder on this and see if I may change my stance.
Author:  Goat [ Sat Feb 21, 2009 8:26 pm ]
Post subject: 
Obviously it has to be tightly controlled, but I think that making it legal - or more legal than it currently is - wouldn't be such a terrible idea. If you were seriously ill and in constant pain you'd be thinking about suicide whether it was legal or not.
Author:  noodles [ Sat Feb 21, 2009 8:28 pm ]
Post subject: 
i'm all for it. as for situations like this, i think that assisted suicide should be something the patient has to request rather than something the doctor can bring up as a possible option.
Author:  traptunderice [ Sat Feb 21, 2009 11:04 pm ]
Post subject: 
I want to say that assisted suicide is a nasty side effect of states' unwillingness to provide for their citizens what they could easily provide; necessities of living, healthcare, jobs. It is really fucked up when "rational" western governments choose to have people commit suicide rather than to medicate/treat their diseases.
Author:  Goat [ Tue Feb 24, 2009 10:14 pm ]
Post subject: 
I think this thread proves that people care more about dead babies than dead sick people.
Author:  rio [ Tue Feb 24, 2009 10:23 pm ]
Post subject: 
Dunno, I just agree with what people have said... Often I only post to voice curmudgeonly disagreement.
Author:  traptunderice [ Wed Feb 25, 2009 12:39 am ]
Post subject: 
It's not as polarized as abortion. You have to be pretty conservative to outright want to ban assisted suicide unlike abortion which both sides of the spectrum have some degree of hesitancy about it.
Author:  Cú Chulainn [ Wed Feb 25, 2009 9:59 am ]
Post subject: 
What about the possibility of being forced into assisted suicide?
Author:  Azrael [ Wed Feb 25, 2009 12:52 pm ]
Post subject: 
legislate it so that the assisted suicide option should always come from the person who's terminal or in great pain or whatever.

Quote:
i'm all for it. as for situations like this, i think that assisted suicide should be something the patient has to request rather than something the doctor can bring up as a possible option.

(noodles)

of course the other option, continued medical care, should always be made available, otherwise the state could indirectly force someone into AS. how hard this would be to put into practise in the US, i have no idea.
Author:  Goat [ Wed Feb 25, 2009 12:56 pm ]
Post subject: 
Since everyone seems to be for it, I'm going to change my mind and say it's bad and evil and the first steps toward a NeoNazi government and what if they discovered a cure ten minutes after you died and what if the family wanted your money and pushed you into it and people in serious pain aren't mentally capable of making such decisions and murder is murder whether the person you kill wants to die or not and it's a slippery slope soon they'll be offing old people in the street if they cough once too many times.

Yes.
Author:  Cú Chulainn [ Wed Feb 25, 2009 1:31 pm ]
Post subject: 
Goat wrote:
Since everyone seems to be for it, I'm going to change my mind and say it's bad and evil and the first steps toward a NeoNazi government and what if they discovered a cure ten minutes after you died and what if the family wanted your money and pushed you into it and people in serious pain aren't mentally capable of making such decisions and murder is murder whether the person you kill wants to die or not and it's a slippery slope soon they'll be offing old people in the street if they cough once too many times.

Yes.


"Bring out yer dead! Bring out yer dead!"
Author:  ganeshaRules [ Wed Feb 25, 2009 1:41 pm ]
Post subject: 
I'm for assisted suicide for all people that I hate, willing or unwilling, by the power of my sword.

And after that, I'll use their skulls to drink beer.

True metal answer!
Author:  hellraiser_xes [ Wed Mar 18, 2009 7:30 am ]
Post subject: 
noodles wrote:
i'm all for it. as for situations like this, i think that assisted suicide should be something the patient has to request rather than something the doctor can bring up as a possible option.


They can only request (if it's legal) if they know that such services are offered. But I'll be frank, if I'm terminally ill and the government offers to fund my own death, I'll find it rude and shocking. But at least I'll know I'll have a choice to end all the hassle my family goes through putting up with a living vegetable or anything else sickly.

But paying for assisted suicide rather than medical fees is a very bad joke. Very.
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