Posted on 04/12/2015 6:24:49 AM PDT by Kaslin
The assisted-suicide movement is the rare self-proclaimed civil rights movement that exists to cater to the wishes of affluent Americans. On Tuesday, the California Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on SB 128, a bill to legalize assisted suicide in the state. (Proponents don't like the word suicide, so they call the measure the "End of Life Option Act.") Supporters talk of their fear of medical personnel's prolonging their lives, of pain and lack of autonomy; opponents fear that the bill's passage would represent a callous act of cultural abandonment of the sick and disabled.
I don't mean to suggest that life is easy for those who have a personal stake in the bill's passage. Christina Symonds, 43, gave heart-rending testimony about her battle with ALS. Because she wants the ability to choose assisted suicide, her family moved to Oregon, which legalized assisted suicide 17 years ago. "I do not want to live my last days in a wheelchair, fully paralyzed, connected to a breathing machine," she said. "To me, that is the picture of horror." That is certainly not the end any young mother would choose.
Clearly, California should have a system that provides Symonds the best care and best pain control possible. Pain control has come a long way since Oregon legalized assisted suicide. But there's this sleight of hand on the part of supporters of assisted suicide. They talk about the need to avoid pain, when their real focus is their fear of losing control. It is an understandable, human fear, but it would be wrong to change the emphasis of medicine on healing to assuage that fear.
Democratic state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, a bill co-sponsor, referred to "the lack of dignity" that can occur toward the end of life. That language implies that sick people who choose to live lack dignity.
Marilyn Golden of the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund is living proof that someone with disabilities can face unwanted obstacles and thrive. She tried to prompt committee Democrats to think about the many things that can and do go wrong. Doctors misdiagnose. Family members have the ability to make elderly relatives feel unwanted and alone. Lethal prescriptions are cheaper than complicated treatment, so HMOs have an incentive to push patients out the door. Disease can lead to depression, but that can be treated. When people first get a horrific diagnosis, they think they want to die; later many find that their prognosis turned out to be wrong or that they want to live what life they have left.
Golden's group compiled a list of troubling cases from Oregon -- including a woman with dementia, a potentially depressed woman who had breast cancer for 20 years, sick people with financial problems. The Oregon Health Plan would not cover chemotherapy treatment for a patient with lung cancer or a man with prostate cancer but offered to pay for physician-assisted suicide. Jackson dismissed these cases as numerically insignificant. Golden chalks up the low numbers to Oregon's toothless law, which has no mechanism to uncover abuses.
The hearing room was filled with supporters wearing yellow Compassion & Choices T-shirts. Many talked about their determination to end their lives on their own terms. I often am struck by proponents' -- how can I put this? -- affluence, assurance and sense of entitlement. SB 128 is a bill designed to make suicide more available, more palatable and friendlier.
California has world-class medical care. This bill seeks to address a "First World problem," noted Tim Rosales from the opposition. Rosales steered me toward Ken Barnes, a San Diego management consultant who used to be on the executive committee of the California conference of the NAACP. Barnes handily summed up SB 128 supporters: They tend to be white, educated, affluent and able to navigate the health system. Though they think they are "progressive," they are oblivious to the downside for "people of color and people who don't know how to advocate for themselves." They're like white guys who don't understand why black men are leery of police.
To that point: Oil heiress Ann Getty hosts Compassion & Choices fundraisers. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, from Pacific Heights, supports SB 128. The bill's sponsors, Democratic state Sens. Bill Monning and Lois Wolk, hail from Carmel and Davis, respectively, with co-sponsors from Santa Barbara and San Francisco.
The always affable Bob Hertzberg, the Democratic state senator representing the San Fernando Valley, confessed he once blocked a similar bill but said he supports SB 128. Because: "What's the role of government?"
Surely, Hertzberg and the other proponents know that the state cannot stop people from killing themselves. More than 40,000 sad, desperate Americans do it every year. So Hertzberg must see it as a fit role for government to encourage suicide and change the face of medicine by giving doctors a license to prescribe intentionally lethal overdoses. In a world with premium medical care, that is dignity.
Gov. Jerry Brown spent time with Mother Teresa in Kolkata. His office won't say whether he'd sign or veto an assisted-suicide bill. He knows what he should do. True compassion engenders striving to cure illness, relieve pain and offer warmth to those who are suffering. That is dignity.
Those who say they want the option of assisted suicide, said Barnes, essentially are "pointing at a disabled person and saying, 'I don't want to live like that.'" That's not dignity.
I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would need someone else’s assistance to kill themselves.
“I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would need someone else’s assistance to kill themselves.”
It’s about gaining approval and social acceptance. There is a cultural stigma and like all cultural stigmas this too must go. It’s also about giving others even more control over us, especially over when and how inexpensively we die. A right to die is a very short step from a duty to die, or as Europe England have proven, doctor approved murder.
Why can’t you go to the store and get a death drug kit? Because the government will not allow its sale. That’s government control, albeit one that you agree with.
As far as the assistance angle is concerned, all but one of the suicides in my circle of “friends’ have been horribly messy. They were gruesome scenes discovered by a family member or friends. An argument could be offered that this is a clean suicide bill.
Approval and Social Acceptance? I disagree. Why would a person care about how people view their suicide after they’ve killed themselves? Here the issue proceeds to religion. Good Luck with that.
Plenty of sick people cannot even eat or drink by themselves. Of course they would need assistance
The U.S. today is following almost the exact same path the Germans took in the 1920s and early 1930s under the Weimar Republic.
Because euthanasia is *never* about suicide. It is about *murder*. Look to the European examples.
In Britain, the NHS now regularly murders some 30,000 people a year, not counting abortions. More and more, this is done without the knowledge or agreement of the victims, or their families. The preferred method is starvation, because it is cheap, and is an act of omission and inaction, not commission.
They are also very self-righteous about murdering people, as those who practice euthanasia typically are. Either alleging that their victims are “suffering”, or that they are “defective”, or that they “would have died anyway.”
On the continent it is even worse. They prey on people with mental illness, even very treatable and temporary kinds. The most common mental illness is depression, and they try to exploit the condition to murder the depressed person.
There is no longer any hint of caring or compassion, just predation and the lust to murder. All they need is a pagan god to appreciate their homicides, but they are just as bloodthirsty without one. Atheists need no excuse.
This isn’t about the rights of extremely ill people. It’s about money. Typically, a person incurs the highest medical bills when nearing the end of life. The left wants the government to pay for all medical care—so wants control of all of the money—and wants a way to prevent the end-of-life expenses while making it appear that they are promoting the rights of the sick.
It’s the same with disabled people—pushing their deaths, while proclaiming to have their best interests at heart.
As always, the left pretends to be compassionate, but, in reality, is looking for more excuses to kill people and destroy their human dignity.
>http://www.sconews.co.uk/opinion/44363/why-euthanasia-is-partially-blind-to-love/<
Why euthanasia is partially blind to love
It is a tool for selfish families.
How can they argue this is humane, when they say iit’s not humane for someone on death row.
It’s nothing but liberal logic
Go out to the garage and start the car. Leave doors shut and put Milli Vanilli on the radio.
In my view, assisted suicide is about abdicating responsibility. Suicide is something someone is ironically in full control of and this sounds like something someone would choose if it meant that someone else were in fact doing the ‘dirty work’ and they could absolve themselves of thinking that they were doing this to themselves.
Exactly; they can gleefully end up killing their relatives for the inheritance or anything that would ‘unburden’ them of ‘having’ to care for an elderly parent. Then it could be used to kill off ‘sick’ kids (even if the mother is a Munchausen by Proxy sociopath) and end up with a child free fun lifestyle.
Get the general acceptance of assisted suicide- not big step to having Govt tell you your life is no longer worthwhile. Either you end or we will for the good of collective
I’m all for assisted suicide, as long as it’s an adult making the decision about themselves.
I think it’s about having a choice. I do not want to live my life, however long it would be, stuck in a bed, hooked to a machine that keeps me alive, or in a wheelchair, not being able to do anything for myself, just because there are people out in the world who think they know better than me on how I should live, or die.
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