Today, Anita Cameron testified via online access to oppose Minnesota’s assisted suicide bill while John Kelly and Diane Coleman submitted written testimony to the MN House of Representatives Health Finance and Policy Committee.
Below are excerpts from each and their names links to their full testimonies.
Research has documented Black, Asian, and Hispanic persons regularly experience barriers to palliative/hospice care utilization. …Although Black people and other people of color request assisted suicide less than white people at this point, as the practice is normalized, they are more at risk of pressure to do so. First, racial disparities in healthcare lead to limited health choices and poorer health outcomes including death. Economic disparities make it less likely that patients can afford life-saving treatment and more likely that doctors will “write off” patients as terminal and thus eligible for assisted suicide…
There is no way to contain eligibility to a narrow set of people. Especially when thousands of disabled Americans now live with conditions that in some states are seen as “worse than death.” Anorexia nervosa and diabetes can now qualify as terminal conditions. Once death is accepted as a positive outcome of medical care, it inevitably gets offered to more and more people.
The problem for us disabled people is that we are already treated badly in the medical system. As medicine has focused increasingly on patient “quality-of-life” as a barometer of life-worthiness, death has been recharacterized as a benefit to an ill or disabled individual. Most physicians (82%, a 2020 Harvard study found) view our “quality-of-life” as worse than nondisabled people.
Data from states where assisted suicide is legal show that all people who request assisted suicide have disabilities, even if some don’t think of their impairments that way, and that unmet disability related needs are their reasons for wanting to die….
We are deeply concerned that the proposed delete-all amendment requires providers to offer physician assisted suicide along with other treatment and palliative care options when a patient receives a terminal diagnosis. Doctors and other providers are in a position that carries status and authority. Bringing up assisted suicide to a patient who has not raised the issue themselves conveys a dangerous and demoralizing message by its very nature and could even be taken as an implicit endorsement.
Much thanks to Anita Cameron, John Kelly and Diane Coleman! This well-written testimony is most certainly having a big affect.
Whoops, “affect” should have been “effect”