I sometimes hear these thoughts and feelings expressed, so I want to share my responses.
1. I want the freedom, choice and the right to end my life when I want to.
That freedom and choice already exists. When the pain of an illness gets to be too much, you can decide using a number of methods to end your life. Suicide is not illegal in the United States.
What you want is the freedom to doctor shop until you find a doctor who will give you suicide pills, even if it means that the choice to live will be taken away from some elders and people with disabilities who do not want to die.
It’s especially incomprehensible to argue for a right to assisted suicide as an accepted medical treatment option when we don’t yet have a right to health care, and the threat to such health care access as we do have is growing. For Blacks and People of Color, the racial disparities in health care are too great for us to be fooled into believing that we should have the “option” of assisted suicide as a medical procedure. As the cheapest procedure, it’s not a benefit but a threat.
2. The doctor told me that I have six months or less to live.
Doctors make mistakes about terminal diagnoses. It happens far more often than you think. Doctors should be helping people to live, not helping them to die. It is normal to become depressed after being told this. Doctors should be getting their patients into therapy at this point.
3. I want to just go to sleep and die with dignity.
People can already choose to die in their sleep by using hospice services. That’s what hospice medications, up to and including palliative sedation, do.
In contrast, there is no guarantee that the suicide pills the doctor will prescribe will simply put you to sleep in a few minutes. Sometimes it takes hours, even days, to die. Sometimes, because of the type of medicine or chemical used, you may experience pain, the very thing you were trying to avoid.
4. I want to end my life under the care and guidance of a doctor.
Contrary to popular belief, the only thing that the doctor does is prescribe the medication. The doctor is usually not with you when you take the medication, when you (or your spouse, parent or caregiver) open each of the 100 capsules and pour them into water or food and take them. With no independent witness required to be there, you might have a family member or caregiver who will give you the pills, but you’d better hope that they are not more anxious to have it be over than you are.
5. I will lose the ability to do the things that I used to be able to do.
This is a disability concern, not an end of life issue. It shouldn’t be a reason to want to die, but for the all too common societal view that its better to be dead than disabled. That very view is why doctor assisted suicide is so dangerous for people with disabilities. Our lives and quality of life are devalued by many doctors. Instead of prescribing home based care, attendant services, and possibly some counseling, some doctors see death as the only viable option for some of us.
Anita Cameron tells hard truth about the reality of the dangers of Physician Assisted Suicide that is not understood by most Medicare/Medicaid Patients who think the discussion about PAS has nothing to do with them.
The failure of the Courts to stop the abuse of Physician issued Do Not Resuscitate Orders that are misused to shorten the lives or hasten the deaths of elderly patients in US public hospitals without their informed consent indicates that the Courts will not stop the abuse of PAS.
The sad reality is that “it’s always about the money” and it is said that the higher courts always protect the money under the guise that this supports the greatest “public good.” .
Medical error—the third leading cause of death in the US
http://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139.full
Yes Hospital Medical Errors are said to be the third leading cause of death in the United States. Senator Sanders had a public hearing on this disgraceful state of affairs but since both political parties are complicit in not protecting the patients and, instead, in protecting the hospitals, Medicare/Medicaid patients are sacrificed to these statistics and have no legal recourse under existing law when they are the victims of mistakes and errors that are NOT reimbursed to hospitals under Administrative Law passed by the Congress of the USA. The unilateral overt or covert DNR Code Status that can be entered into the hospital charts by physicians can be misused to hasten the death or shorten the lives of those Medicare/Medicaid patients for whom there will be no further reimbursments from Medicare, Medicare Advantage, or Medicaid. because of mistake or error or because they qualify only for HOSPICE care under “managed care” and “managed death” reimbursement protocols that are replacing “fee for service” Medicare and Medicaid under the ACA. . .