Posted on 08/21/2011 10:39:00 AM PDT by wagglebee
“I think that anyone who finds they’re terminal, and there’s no turning back, and they decide they want to go, they should have that right,” said the 72-year-old Quincy resident as he sat over morning coffee at Barry’s Deli in Wollaston.
The question dropped on Almeida’s breakfast table could be dropped in front of Massachusetts voters next year if a ballot initiative filed early this month with the state attorney general can pass legal reviews and muster some 70,000 signatures from registered voters.
The proposal to legalize assisted suicide for some terminally ill patients is likely to ignite a lot of debate. It was a controversial enough subject that 643 Patriot Ledger readers chimed in on a website questionnaire.
Nearly three-quarters – 474 – said they would vote in favor of such a referendum.
Backers of the ballot initiative have hired Quincy-based political consultant Michael Clarke to help push the “Death With Dignity Act” onto the 2012 ballot.
The proposed law would permit patients “with a terminal disease that will cause death within six months” to obtain drugs to “end his or her life in a humane and dignified manner.” The plan also requires the patient to be capable of making medical decisions and to consult with physicians.
Similar laws were passed in Oregon and Washington. In Oregon last year, 96 prescriptions for lethal medications were written, and 59 people took their own lives with those drugs.
Oregon enacted its own Death with Dignity Act in 1997, and a Brookline expert on the topic of assisted suicide said Oregon’s law is the standard to emulate.
“It was a wonderful experiment in Oregon when they started, and the experiment worked out,” said Dr. Milton Heifetz, a retired neurosurgeon and former professor at Boston College Law School.
Hiefetz cautioned that the decision should rest with the patient and not the doctor and added that the potential pitfall of these laws is a doctor’s terminal diagnosis.
“It’s very difficult to determine what is six months,” said Heifetz. “But I will say that it should certainly be passed if it’s written right.”
An opponent of such laws is Dr. Michael Grodin, a professor of health law at the Boston University School of Public Health, who called the initiative a symptom of a deeper problem, but not a solution.
“The problem is people don’t die very well. They die in hospitals and in pain when they should be at home with hospice care and with their loved ones,” he said. “I am very wary of assisted suicide when 45 million people don’t have health insurance or access to home health aides. The real issue is to support dying people.”
Outside of academia, the debate seems to elicit gut reactions from people.
Jude Sherman, who was shopping for used books at the Goodwill Store in Quincy, said she would vote against an assisted-suicide ballot question.
“It’s a slippery slope when you start that. Some people might just be weary of life and depressed,” she said. “I do believe people can have good and bad days and might make a bad decision.”
in·alien·able
adj
Definition of INALIENABLE
: incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred
Those who think there is a “right to die” don’t know the first thing about right, rights, or what America even is.
I disagree completely.
And this comes from experience, and from a wife in the profession.
Hospitals, dealing with people in their final stages of disease go out of their way to ensure that they are as pain free as possible.
This statement makes it sound like the folks in the hospital are heartless animals.
And if you think people are not given increasing doses of morphine at the end, you are not paying attention.
Before my operation (liver transplant, and my own damned fault as a long term alcoholic - dry 2 years now) I used to volunteer on our local hospital’s terminal ward two days a week.
I don’t know about the American system, but Vermont Lt has it right.
Nurses and Doctors are human. They have empathy (mostly), though the job forces them to hide it well. If someone is in pain, they will get an extra dose of pain killers.
If someone really wants to die, I am in favor of allowing them to as peacefully as possible. After all, why would you refuse to extend the same mercy to a person as you would to a slowly and painfully dying dog?
Living or dying is the ultimate inalienable right, in my mind.
Medical staff walk a fine line - found that out the hard way as a medic in the Falklands. I don’t particularly like the idea of it being “mandated and approved” but I can see times when it would be a kindness.
Sometimes, it is.
A lot of “traditional” liberal societies defend their policies by saying they follow an older(no pun intended) order of things-a time when infanticide was considered normal and older people were treated as precious and priceless.That people are born weak and get stronger and wiser as they get older.
That children are burden and that the old provide wisdom as they get older on the proper running of a society and following authority.
Realistically you are just either so much expenses or so much revenue to these people,aborting the unborn means less kids in school.........more money for the government and who work for them.
Liberal society does indeed have a special place for the elderly in the future much like it has a special place for the unborn these days.
It is always like that.
Yes, it was sarcasm. Was it not obvious enough?
Not when you consider that there have been more than a few FReepers over the years who actually support exactly what you proposed.
Exactly.
the New England Journal of medicine has been pushing this since 1988, and it has been taught as okay in some of the medical schools since that time, according to one of my prolife friends who taught at Harvard.
What slowed them down was the Christian doctors, not the Catholic ones. We wrote the Cardinal (Law) about what was going on to urge him to alert the church about it, and all we got was a letter from one of the secretaries and a vague article in the church newspaper that didn’t come to the point. My friends said the bishop probably never saw the letter.
Which makes me think similarly his staff hid much of the pedophilia problems from him (especially of one priest who was popular with the liberals for his work with the poor).
I was happy when he was “kicked upstairs” to a vague Vatican post, although I think a stint nursing lepers or HIV cases in Africa would have been a better penance for the guy.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.