Bush administration asks Supreme Court to block assisted suicide law in Oregon

Doctors have been helping people to die for many years. The Oregon Law does not force ANY doctor to participate. If anyone here has ever done hospice work, they would know that those in excruciating pain are still not given enough drugs to obliterate that pain totally. That amount of drugs would, in fact, kill them.

My elderly neighbor decided to die after being told that the doctors were going to have to amputate her left leg. She had been on dialysis for several years, and that was a miserable ordeal with no end in sight. She chose to stop her dialysis and lived a week. Hospice caregivers were there to make sure she had no pain. I don't know that I could ever make such a brave choice, but I believe she had the right to choose her own destiny at that point.

Look at the numbers. Few assisted suicides have been logged because it takes a lot of paperwork, psych evals, and red tape to get to the end of that process. More often people who have the ability to swallow dozens of pills are given enough to do the job without the formal acknowledgment of what will happen if "you take all these at once."

It is easy for those who have not born the pain of a terminal illness to say that those who want to commit suicide can "just do it" and call it murder if assisted. These are people, in my opinion, who have never had to do a bowel treatment or any of the other dozens of acts for a person who has no ability to use their own body, but whose minds are totally aware of what is happening to them. Go and volunteer at a quadripligic clinic and see for yourself, then think what it would be like to be helpless AND terminal.

Do not judge what you do not yourself understand. I think this is a very personal choice and not one where I want the government involved.

May none of you ever be in the kind of pain that prompted this law in the first place.

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