An Open Letter to NJ Gov. Murphy on the PAS Bill

Dear Governor Murphy,

I am sure you want to stay alive but the physician-assisted suicide act would not help on that and, instead, harm you and many other New Jerseyites.

As physicians, policy analysis and health care personnel, family members and friends, we note that NJ’s proponents of assisted suicide/ right-to-die have not been the most astute people (Assemblyman Karl Wendell III committed suicide by jumping off a building; the founder of Compassion and Choices Derek Humphrey is a murderer who suffocated his wife when the pills he bought took longer to act and Assemblyman and present bill champion John Burzichelli, another high school graduate, felt that the death of his father-in-law from suicidal gunshot wound could have been prevented if assisted suicide was available. This was ignoring the fact that white older men with medical issues, compounded with being a military veteran with access to a weapon, made him an easy risk for depression and a violent suicide, something that is not at all outrightly preventable with an assisted suicide bill. Forensic and mental care professionals among us easily note that physician-assisted bills even increase the suicide trap, when public health goals from the CDC demands that we decrease it. 

We also like to point of the lack of knowledge of a clinical encounter in the bill language. When one goes to a doctor, he or she hopes to be aided—to be offered kindness and assistance. Patients and family members whose physicians have been dismissive or outright unkind enough to verbalize an invitation to assisted suicide end up very unsatisfied and angry at such overriding of their right to not be harmed. 

It is therefore disgusting that the legislators kowtow to unschooled or uncaring advocates who seem to ignore the irreparable damage done to societies, especially in Europe who has sadly legally killed much longer. 

New Jersey has ranked lowest in suicide and highest in healthcare. Why do you want that reversed and make it like pathetic? This is the Garden State, not a memorial lawn. This is a believing, God-fearing state, with doctors and nurses believing and working hard to see their patients off to return to their families and accompany them even in their medical crisis. Other states, like in the Northwest may be more godless, but we are not a place of mass murderers and Kevorkians nor want to be. We also have a tradition of fiscal sense that do not want our health care and tax money to be spent unnecessarily for suicides that cost $1 million each per the CDC. Assisted suicide-passing states have shown hemorrhaging of budgets for general suicide; why impoverish and mutilate the state when you have, as your office dictates, pledged to be the Father and protector of it? 

It is simply ignorant of lawmakers to insinuate that the bill is to “protect the vulnerable from abuse” or “is in the public interest and is necessary for the welfare of the State and its residents”. What has the other states show? People are asking to be killed even though their condition is not terminal. (Oregon Health Department data)  People who are despairing are nudged to getting suicide more easily. The bill makes a claim of having the protective measure of psychiatrists being called to determine that the patient is “capable” when they are incapable on the very desire of them to end their lives. This is a sign of depression, of untreated pain that needs to be addressed rather than the person snuffed out. And practitioners have ceased to populate forms because it is voluntary and useless; they are agreeing to murder (per the WHO definition), why bother with a form?  

No one in their right mind will want to kill themselves. Therefore, impaired judgement is automatic in people who want to commit suicide. Mal-practice is also in the heart of physicians who want to participate in it. 

This is a dogma in science and will indicate how right-to-die people are so outside of foundational knowledge: people are normally resilient and want to be helped to thrive. It is also basic that when you give the devil an inch, he will take over. 

New Jersey is a blessed state, the only place in the world outside of Rome and Jerusalem where all the seven rites of the Catholic Church exist. It is blessed for its natural resources and its joy filled, fun-and-music-and-food loving people. We are family oriented and makes no bones of calling things as they are. And this is what it is: it will damn the people who participate in it, damn the health care providers who play along with it, damn the families who sign off on it, damn the state and their families because of the over-all deterioration of quality of life. Look at the medical journals (British Medical Journal), film (Fatal Flaws), books (Deadly Compassion), websites (PatientRightsCouncil.org)that reveal the post-traumatic stress syndrome that happen to families who participate, the burn out that happens to doctors, the chain of suicide that traps anyone who assists the cause, the murders of the innocent and the trusting and the elderly that ultimately becomes widespread—to infants, to the strong, to those easily medically treated. 

Don’t go to hell on account of not knowing these facts, dear Governor. Hell is a real place for those who have been there (www.gloriapolo.net, a contemporary dentist was given a chance to return to tell others). The rest of the facts can easily be checked. We as medical professionals and public health advocates and their families and friends want doctors who are after our best interests to live and flourish, not to be at a setting where false healers play plain dosage counters eager to put a human life out as easily as they do can do to a horse, in the words of a Compassion and Choices doctor. Finally the World Health Organization defines assisted suicide and euthanasia as homicide/suicide, as acts of violence, which should always be prevented. The negation of existing laws that seek to protect, preserve and oversee (Medical Examiner, Ombudsman, Mandated Reporters) we well as betrayal of professional oaths in pharmacy, medicine, psychology and social work as well as the State’s paramount duty to uphold, not drag down, citizens’ living and healthcare standards.

Sincerely, 

A family of faithful