Testimony of Pam Daly, Second Thoughts Massachusetts

I became paralyzed in a car accident when I was 17. The doctor’s told my parents “your child is gravely injured but she’s young and has her whole life ahead of her so we want do everything in our power to keep her alive.

Fast forward 51 years and I am no longer young and I’m no longer sure that my doctors will do everything they can to keep me alive.

I’m vulnerable now and I’m not even sick. This is not paranoia speaking, this is just a fact that I’ve experienced with my healthcare providers when they decided not to set my broken femur and didn’t weigh me before each chemotherapy infu- sion as they did for every other patient. I wonder what decisions would be made about my healthcare options now if I were brought into the hospital unconscious and could not speak up for myself. The doctors, hospitals and insurance companies would make the decisions for me – would I measure up to their standards of a life worth saving or not?

Coercion is something people might not believe really happens. But we have countless stories of patients or the families who were coerced into choosing death by medical assisted suicide over medical intervention. We know insurance companies aren’t shy about denying treatments. Our doctors know next to nothing about caring for a person with a complex disability because they are not taught that in medical school. Take a look at Harvard Medical School’s four year curriculum. You will not find a single course addressing our care needs. And yet these are the people who would have our lives in their hands when they decide that we do or do not have the potential for a good quality of life.

I don’t want to live where a doctor is given immunity, by this proposed law, to call my fate. No doctor should be put in that position. Instead we should put our good money to work perfecting excellent physical and mental comforts and not be in the business of helping people commit suicide. If someone wishes to commit suicide that should indeed be their choice, it should not be the choice of

a doctor or an insurance company. Freedom of choice for me means leaving my doctor out of it and leaving state law out of it. There should be no Massachusetts law that allows a doctor to prescribe a lethal dose to anyone. If you have any doubt about the moral complexing of this law I hope you will choose not to pass it in MA.