Massachusetts Medical Society Announces Opposition to Legalization of Assisted Suicide (No on 2)

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Last Friday, September 14, the Massachusetts Medical Society announced its opposition to ballot question 2 – in which a ‘yes’ vote would legalize physician-assisted suicide in that state.  Below is a link and the announcement in its entirety.  This is a very welcome development!

Question 2: Prescribing Medication to End Life

September 14, 2012

The Massachusetts Medical Society opposes this ballot question.

On November 6, Massachusetts voters will have the opportunity to vote on Question 2, “Prescribing Medication to End Life.”

We are opposed to Question 2 for these reasons:

  • The proposed safeguards against abuse are insufficient. Enforcement provisions, investigation authority, oversight, or data verification are not included in the act. A witness to the patient’s signed request could also be an heir.
  • Assisted suicide is not necessary to improve the quality of life at the end of life. Current law gives every patient the right to refuse lifesaving treatment, and to have adequate pain relief, including hospice and palliative sedation.
  • Predicting the end of life within six months is difficult; sometimes the prediction is not accurate. From time to time, patients expected to be within months of their death have gone on to live many more months — or years. In one study, 17 percent of patients outlived their prognosis.
  • Doctors should not participate in assisted suicide. The chief policy making body of the Massachusetts Medical Society has voted to oppose physician assisted suicide.

The Massachusetts Medical Society has reaffirmed its commitment to provide physicians treating terminally ill patients with the ethical, medical, social, and legal education, training, and resources to enable them to contribute to the comfort and dignity of the patient and the patient’s family.

Lynda M. Young, MD, MMS past president, testified about the MMS policy at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on March 6, 2012:

“Allowing physicians to participate in assisted suicide would cause more harm than good. Physician assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer. “Instead of participating in assisted suicide, physicians must aggressively respond to the needs of patients at the end of life. …  Patients must continue to receive emotional support, comfort care, adequate pain control, respect for patient autonomy, and good communication.”

Loose Ends – Last Two Essays on Bill Peace’s ‘Comfort Care As Denial of Personhood’ Up at Hastings Center Bioethics Forum

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This is kind of old news by now, but it should be of interest to anyone who read previous posts on this topic.  I’d also urge anyone who hasn’t read Bill Peace’s essay to do so, along with the commentary posted on the Bioethics Forum at the Hastings Center Site.

Just to refresh people’s memories and to provide background info on Bill’s essay and the responses, here’s what we wrote in a previous post:

Back in 2010, our friend, colleague and ally Bill Peace, experienced a long, expensive health crisis when he experienced a stage IV skin breakdown – with a long treatment process that was physically and emotionally grueling by his own accounts.

While Bill was hospitalized – and at one of his lowest points healthwise – he was subjected to a late night visit by a hospitalist.  Laying out a grim set of possible outcomes for Bill’s health crisis, the doctor seemed to be urging Bill to just discontinue antibiotics and let himself be given palliative care to be pain-free until the infection took him.

Below are the links to Bill’s essay, and the three commentaries:

Comfort Care as Denial of Personhood by William J. Peace

Commentaries/Reactions to Comfort Care as Denial of Personhood:

  • “Disability Discrimination” by Diane Coleman and Stephen Drake – We discuss evidence that Bill Peace’s account of feeling devalued and threatened in a healthcare setting may be just the tip of an ugly iceberg.
  • “Disability Discrimination: Risky Business for “Consenting” Adults” – Philosopher Anita Silvers writes that Bill Peace’s account “stirs a familiar feeling of fear” – and one that may be shared by many visibly disabled people.
  • “Disability Discrimination: A Doctor’s View” – Palliative care physician Theresa A. Soriano offers Bill Peace an apology for “the fear and alienation” a member of her own profession caused him.  She outlines what the physician should have done, if he wanted to be helpful; things that are standard practice for those competent in communicating about palliative care.

Bill responded to all three essays in a long and thoughtful post on the Forum blog titled ‘Disability Discrimination – The Author Responds.’  (I suggest you go read this after reading the first three responses)

All of us who responded to Bill’s essay were given a chance to submit a second short essay/post in hopes of a longer discussion.  Apparently, we’re the only ones who took the editors up on the offer.  Our latest contribution to the discussion is titled “End of Life,” Value Judgments and Ending Lives.”  Here’s an excerpt:

Bill’s ordeal offers a prime example of why we almost always put scare quotes around the term “end of life.” It’s clear that the physician was steering Bill toward making “end-of-life” choices, which in this case would be defined as “decisions that will end your life.” This is an increasingly common use of the term – to deceptively describe the assignation of a disabled person to “end-of-life” status by virtue of decisions (chosen or imposed) that will end the person’s life, although the person may not, or even definitely would not, die if the decision were different.

In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be revisiting these confused and conflated terms and continue to try to make more sense of them in context.  I predict there will be no shortage of opportunities to do so.

 

Dr. Thomas Szasz Dies at Age 92, Critic of Coercion and Psychiatry

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In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined. – Thomas Szasz

Strictly speaking, assisted suicide is an oxymoron. –Thomas Szasz

From the NY Times:

Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist whose 1961 book “The Myth of Mental Illness” questioned the legitimacy of his field and provided the intellectual grounding for generations of critics, patient advocates and antipsychiatry activists, making enemies of many fellow doctors, died Saturday at his home in Manlius, N.Y. He was 92.

He died after a fall, his daughter Dr. Margot Szasz Peters said.

Dr. Szasz (pronounced sahz) published his critique at a particularly vulnerable moment for psychiatry. With Freudian theorizing just beginning to fall out of favor, the field was trying to become more medically oriented and empirically based. Fresh from Freudian training himself, Dr. Szasz saw psychiatry’s medical foundation as shaky at best, and his book hammered away, placing the discipline “in the company of alchemy and astrology.”

Dr. Szasz argued against coercive treatments, like involuntary confinement, and the use of psychiatric diagnoses in the courts, calling both practices unscientific and unethical. He was soon placed in the company of other prominent critics of psychiatry, including the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman and the French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Edward Shorter, the author of “A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac” (1997), called Dr. Szasz “the biggest of the antipsychiatry intellectuals.”

You can read the rest of the long – but hardly comprehensive – obituary here.  If you want to find more about Szasz and his work, I recommend checking out the Thomas S. Szasz Cybercenter for Liberty and Responsibility.

Anyone who is interested in various perspectives and arguments against legalized assisted suicide should check out some of his writing on the topic.  You are guaranteed to strongly disagree with some of what he wrote over the years.  Other material will give you food for thought – and some different ways of thinking about the issues, especially when talking to libertarians.

You can read excerpts from two essays Szasz wrote dealing with assisted suicide, along with active links to the entire essays by clicking here.

Personal Note: Our apologies for the sporadic postings over the past couple of weeks.  Diane Coleman and I have both been on semi-vacation and taking care of what some people say is long-overdue personal business.  Anyone who is curious can check out the photos at this link.

Archdiocese of Boston Newspaper Features Interview with ‘Second Thoughts’ Director John Kelly

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The online version of The Pilot – “the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston” – published an article focusing on ‘Second Thoughts‘ and featuring a long interview with the organization’s director, John Kelly.

Disabilities group has ‘Second Thoughts’ on assisted suicide

By Christopher S. Pineo

 

BOSTON — A group of Massachusetts residents with disabilities opposing legalized assisted suicide are asking Massachusetts voters to have “second thoughts” when they vote on Question 2 in November.

Second Thoughts: People with Disabilities Opposing the Legalization of Assisted Suicide (www.second-thoughts.org) is a Boston based steering committee of disabled people from Massachusetts formed in 2011 to educate and organize the Massachusetts disability community to respond to the ballot initiative. The name “Second Thoughts” emphasizes that rather than offering individual choice, assisted suicide laws create a potentially discriminatory and dangerous practice.

According to the group’s website, Second Thoughts seeks to move the context of the assisted suicide debate beyond simplified political divisions, “between conservative ‘right to life’ and religious groups on one side, and ‘liberals’ who support individual choice on the other.”

Second Thoughts says it encourages voters “to look at assisted suicide in the real world” which it says is one “where insurance companies and other organizations try to limit spending on health care”; “where disabled people face discrimination through architectural barriers and unemployment while lacking in-home services to enable them to integrate into communities”; “where some people think it might be better to be dead than disabled”; and “where abuse and financial exploitation of elders and people with disabilities is at unacceptably high levels.”

John Kelly, director, said the idea of providing “dignity” through death holds dangerous implications for society, and particularly for people with disabilities.

“It is dangerous for people who are already disadvantaged in terms of getting adequate medical care and full social respect. It is very dangerous for a society with such great levels of inequality,” he said.

Kelly described the idea of someone restoring their dignity through death as holding a connotation directly opposed to living with a disability.

“This word ‘dignity,’ which is never defined, we know that it generally means someone who is autonomous in their self-care, someone who does not need someone else to care for them,” he said.

“When society makes a law based on one group of people’s notion of dignity it will discriminate against people in that society whose lives look like the lives that are being rejected under the bill.”

There’s a lot more.  John did an outstanding job of laying out many major arguments we and other disability activists have against legalization of assisted suicide.  The readership of this paper is  significantly large – and now will be exposed to some new reasons to vote against legalization – new, in that they’re unlikely to have encountered them before.

UK: ‘Locked-In’ Tony Nicklinson Loses Court Bid for Euthanasia; Second Thoughts and NDY in Coverage

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Yesterday – August 16th, Tony Nicklinson got an answer to his request to Britain’s High Court – to overturn the existing ban on euthanasia and allow his doctor to kill him with legal immunity when he requests it.  I wrote about Nicklinson a little over a month ago and little has changed regarding what I said then:

One sign of the skewed nature of media coverage and the times we live in is how little time and attention are given to the very real life-and-death situations facing people in the UK in the face of draconian shredding of the social safety net for disabled people.  Some of that shredding is already done and much more is to follow.  The majority of people with disabilities in the UK  are much more concerned with how they are going to survive in the face of these cuts rather than how they’re going to die – since these cuts are ensuring that death will come sooner and more painfully for many.  (If you think I’m exaggerating, check out this summary of the latest report gauging the effects of budget cuts to people in the UK.)

But of course that’s not getting that much coverage, especially considering the number of people who will be affected.  What does get coverage is when some selfish, self-absorbed disabled person makes loud public noises about wanting to kill himself – or, more accurately, wants to have someone else be able to legally kill him when he’s ‘ready.’  That’s not a hypothetical person, but describes Tony Nicklinson, who is getting worldwide coverage regarding his wish to have a doctor be able to kill him with a legal injection sometime in the future.

The public, of course, eats this up.  It’s so much easier to get behind the desire of a disabled person to kill himself than it is to support the needs of thousands of people who may require more of you – more support in the community and even a little more from your paycheck to support the services and supports needed for many disabled people to live decent lives.

It doesn’t cost a penny to support suicide for people with disabilities.  And it supports the notion that since our lives suck anyway, the best help we can receive is to make it easier for us to kill ourselves.

What has changed this time is that there is a little more outreach from some major media to disability activists and advocates than last time.   John Kelly, Director of  ‘Second Thoughts,’ appeared a second time on International CNN.  The video is below.  I apologize for the lack of closed captioning or transcript, but CNN isn’t very good about doing either of those for online content, at least in a consistent way.

Later today – Friday, August 17th – there will be a Huffington Post live video online chat about the Nicklinson case that Diane Coleman will be doing with (we think) 3 other people on Huffpost Live for 20 minutes or so, around 3 pm ET.  You can join the chat at this address:

http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/502cf96f78c90a1a3900020f

We might be able to get link to the chat after the fact, but the more NDY supporters who sign on for the live event, the better!