We’re told that there will be another exchange on WBUR between John Kelly and Dr. Marcia Angell on Monday (9/24) on WBUR's morning edition,twice. It will either run during the 5 AM/7 AM hours, or 6 AM/8 AM hours.
Primer: Pro And Con On Mass. Assisted Suicide Ballot Measure
Con and pro: John Kelly, disabilities rights activist and founder of Second Thoughts, who opposes Question 2; and Dr. Marcia Angell, senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, who backs the measure. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
Come November, if you live in Massachusetts, you’ll face a vote on a life-and-death issue (I mean, even more directly life-and-death than Obama v. Romney.) It’s Question 2 on the ballot, also known as the Death With Dignity initiative and the physician-assisted suicide measure.
It’s a big, rich debate infused by reports from earlier such measures in Oregon and Washington, and this 24-minute segment on Radio Boston is a great way to acquaint yourself with it.
Wish you wouldn’t use the word ‘suicide’ when referring to people who are already dying. They are not choosing to death over life, rather opting for the most peaceful and dignified means to an unavoidable death.
Until assisted suicide advocacy groups started objecting to the term, there weren’t qualifiers regarding when killing yourself should be called something other than suicide. The started objecting when the PR firms they hired found that ‘suicide’ had a negative ring to it and should be replaced.
We’re all ‘terminal’ – where’s the cut-off point for when we can call it suicide or when we should call it something else? The Final Exit Network doesn’t want anyone to refer to *their* nonterminally ill ‘clients’ as suicides either. I can’t make sense of it.
And I won’t play along. Suicide is a clear term with a long history. I’ll stick with it.