…“You have two deaths … Most of the time the victim is not in on the plan.” Stephen Drake, a spokesman for Not Dead Yet, a nonprofit group that opposes assisted suicide laws, also expressed concern over how murder-suicides among the elderly are viewed. “These are acts usually of desperation, not compassion,” he said. “These are people who are feeling depressed or overwhelmed. It’s often a consequence of an emotional crisis.” Please read the rest of…
…isability, should be able to choose an assisted suicide. In this increasingly bitter debate, disabled activists claim legalizing assisted suicide would be an ethical “slippery slope” that would lead to all disabled people, no matter the degree of their impairment, being devalued as human beings. In turn, advocates for assisted suicide maintain the arguments of disabled-rights activists are a misplaced over-reaction to their proposals. American rea…
…the one condition which the public has been conditioned to view as invariably and rapidly terminal (i.e. ALS), OPTN/UNOS might anticipate a broader and more concerned reaction to the proposed revisions. Furthermore, it must be noted that the previous, and withdrawn, proposal specifically mentioned people with “upper spinal cord injury” as DCD eligible. Among the national organizations that contacted OPTN/UNOS expressing concern about the previous…
…a salutary effect on another human being. I use the word “hover” deliberately, if a bit provocatively, because that is how families of many brain injury patients viewed it. I know this from interviews with more than 40 families, each with a member who had a disorder of consciousness, who came to Weill Cornell Medical College for enrollment in neuroimaging and EEG studies designed to elucidate mechanisms of recovery. While they were here, we conduc…
…devalued old, ill and disabled. Otherwise, what looks like freedom is really only discrimination. What Should We Learn From Elder Homicide/Suicides? An increasingly common form of domestic violence became the subject of news coverage in Hawaii in late 2009. Seventy-one-year-old Robert Yagi had tended daily to his terminally ill wife’s needs and kept her company since she was hospitalized in October that year. He faced a charge of attempted mu…
