The more I consider legislation for euthanasia/assisted suicide/medical killing the more concerned I become.
Concerned for whom? – For the elderly, people living with disabilities and all vulnerable people.
Why my concern for them? Because I do not believe assisted suicide can ever be enacted without the possibility of abuse. The measure of a society is its protection of the elderly, people living with disabilities, infants, children: the vulnerable. Assisted suicide weakens the protection and care of our more vulnerable members. This is weakens our society, our community. This is a wrong turn. Do not enter.
“Those who believe that legalizing euthanasia and/or assisted-suicide will assure their ‘choice,’ are naive.”
(William Reichel, MD, Coeur d’Alene Press, June 30, 2010) quoted by Margaret K. Dore who writes,
“These acts (legalizing euthanasia/ assisted suicide) empower heirs and others to pressure and abuse older people to cut short their lives. This is especially an issue when the older person has money. There is no assisted-suicide bill that you can write to correct this huge problem.”
Patients are not necessarily dying
Oregon and Washington’s acts apply to “terminal” patients, defined as having no more than six months to live. Such patients are not necessarily dying. Doctor prognoses can be wrong. Moreover, treatment can lead to recovery. Oregon resident, Jeanette Hall, who was diagnosed with cancer and told that she had six months to a year to live, states:
” I wanted to do our law and I wanted my doctor to help me. Instead, he encouraged me to not give up and ultimately I decided to fight. I had both chemotherapy and radiation.
” It is now nearly 10 years later. If my doctor had believed in assisted suicide, I would be dead.”
See her detailed legal article, Aid in Dying: Not Legal in Idaho; Not about Choice. This and other comments pro and against assisted suicide/ euthanasia follow the sad article, Suicide like execution.
Among other comment, eg Sue Neales,’Pollies dodge blame’, a letter to the editor in yesterday’s Mercury Hobart newspaper, page 23, by M.E.Klitzke, Midway Point, captured our inability to guarantee protection of the vulnerable members of our community.
Euthanasia trust lost. A vulnerable child unable to be protected by this Government and legal services, a maximum-security prison which is anything but secure built by this Government and now the Attorney-General, along with Greens leader Nick McKim, will try to convince us that this Government can produce sufficiently safe legislation to protect vulnerable members of our community against involuntary euthanasia. I for one have zero confidence they have the ability to offer such protection.
I count myself among the many Tasmanians who “have zero confidence that they (the Government) have the ability to offer such protection.”
For the sake of our society in general and the elderly, people living with disabilities and the vulnerable in particular, please Attorney-General Lara Gidding and Nick McKim, do not go ahead with this legislation.
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