On August 10th, the New Jersey Trenton Times published an op-ed by Not Dead Yet President and CEO Diane Coleman. Below is an excerpt from her op-ed, titled “N.J. assisted suicide proposal is dangerous prescription“:
As one of countless disabled people who have survived a terminal prediction based on a faulty diagnosis, I can’t help but become concerned when the accuracy of a terminal prognosis determines whether someone gets suicide assistance rather than suicide prevention.
The annual Oregon reports, stipulated under that state’s assisted suicide law, themselves show that non-terminal people are getting lethal prescriptions — up to 1,009 days have passed between the request for assisted suicide and death. One of the many things the reports hide is specifically how many lived longer than six months, but we do know that those people were disabled and not terminal when they sought their lethal prescription. We also know that there’s no consequence to the assisting doctors for this or any other mistake in the assisted suicide process.
Proponents also claim that 15 years of data from Oregon show that safeguards to ensure that assisted suicide is voluntary are working.
How would they know? The Oregon reports tell us only what the prescribing doctors indicated were the patients’ reasons for wanting assisted suicide when they checked off one or more of seven reasons on a multiple-choice state government form.
One of the seven reasons, feelings of being a burden on others, was checked in 57 percent of Oregon’s reported assisted suicide cases last year (39 percent over all the reported years).
But there’s no requirement that home care options that could relieve the burden on family caregivers must be disclosed as part of informed consent under the law, much less that these options must be offered or funded.
Although the Oregon reports admit that the state can’t assess compliance with the safeguards, some independent articles find that safeguards failed in individual cases (see, e.g., Hendin and Foley’s “Physician-Assisted Suicide in Oregon: A Medical Perspective,” Michigan Law Review, June 2008).
But the law includes no authority for investigating or enforcing the safeguard provisions, so nothing happens as a result.
Please read the rest of the op-ed at the Trenton Times.