You’ve taken over 300 million breaths in your life. You can’t imagine your next breath being your last.
Most of us don’t like thinking about dying. Those who do think about it usually do so in a clinical or academic way. Confronting death for real is hard.
Washington Compassion and Choices plans to wage another statewide initiative to legalize assisted suicide. They have decided the quality of life of people with terminal illnesses is so bad that it’s not worth living.
The right to die movement is more about politics than “end of life” decisions. A person with a terminal illness using assisted suicide to end their life is an insurance company’s dream.
Opposition to assisted suicide by Not Dead Yet and people with disabilities has tempered the right to die movement’s political efforts to include disability as a reason for using assisted suicide. Many of the people Dr. Jack Kevorkian helped to end their life were people with disabilities. The most vocal champion of Washington’s assisted suicide initiative is former Governor Booth Gardner. Governor Gardner has a disability and believes assisted suicide should be a choice available to him in ending his life.
We are not sure if the initiative will include people with disabilities as eligible candidates or stick to technically limiting the target population to people with terminal illnesses. In February, 2006 Booth Gardner told the Seattle Times-Intelligencer he wanted a law that would allow “doctors to give lethal injections to patients. Whether it’s “limited” or not, if the initiative passes it won’t take long for the right to die movement to push for something broader. The right to die “movement” considers itself a “movement” because their efforts today are just the beginning of where they plan to go in promoting assisted suicide and euthanasia. (see editor note at the end)
People with disabilities in Washington state know it’s too easy for doctors to decide that a disability is a terminal illness. We know assisted suicide will be recommended for people with disabilities if it becomes legal.
When I read materials from Washington Compassion and Choices it reminds me of Dr. Anna Pou, the New Orleans Doctor who inexplicably escaped criminal charges of giving a lethal doses (Pou denies her intention was to kill, but witness accounts are at odds with her claim) of morphine and versed to four patients. Dr. Pou describes “reverse triage.” “Reverse triage” is the approach she used in deciding what patients would leave the hospital and what patients would receive heavy doses of morphine and versed.
“We divided patients into groups one, two and three. Patients in category one are able to sit up and walk and are not very sick. Patients in three are critically ill, “Do Not Resuscitate.” The ones in category two were sick, but doing much [better than those in category three]. The triage system was very crude—we’d write the number 1, 2 or 3 on a sheet of paper and tape it across the patient’s chest with their hospital records.”
I believe the people of Washington state will again decide that we do not want to adopt a sick method of social reverse triage and defeat the assisted suicide initiative. —Duane French
(Note – for a recent example that gives a rare look at the broader agenda within the pro-assisted suicide movement, please check out “Death Wish,” which will get more discussion here at a later date. — editor)