Assisted Suicide Kills Quality Of Life, Not Just Patients And Healers

Derek Humphrey, the founder of Compassion and Choices, has killed his first wife by his own account. As drugs are weak and even now, known to be generally ineffective in death (as evidenced by so many living drug addicts), he instead took a pillow to finish the act. He was convicted, but was so guilty that he escaped to America from the United Kingdom. One can reason: give him a break, he had a painful childhood, his mother left him and when he tried to reconcile, he said he will get contacted but never was, so he was abandoned all over again. He didn't have the wherewithall to love because he didn't have it.

The spiritually dead are killers or killers-to-be, for the "death of love is the love of death," a wise nine-year old said. But why would we have them dictate to us decent, lifeloving people that we should just kill off those who ask for it? Make the participation of doctors and nurses and pharmacists and family members, all already compromised by burn-out and overwork and confusion be burdened by the participation in a murder which is not at all confusing. For the W.H.O Classification of Injury clearly classifies assisted suicide: as homicide and suicide both, and even if the human law absolves the doctor-murderer, if not but for his prescribing of the drug, the patient will be alive.

He knows too it is wrong, that in the words of one doctor who as those who have studied this issue well know: assisted suicide doesn't stay the way it is--limited to terminal diseases, which is a misnomer by the way, no one, not even the best pathologists which is my speciality--the study of diseases and prognosis--can play God and say you have three months to live. We base it on Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and we premise it on hope. You could be one of the twenty that can make it on the five year mark. Many people have beat the odds. And why not? God can even heal whomever he wishes to heal. Completely. But you need to be alive to be present for that. To claim your gift. Everything is given to those who stick around for the happy ending.

Assisted suicide, which becomes euthanasia, voluntary first--with the doctor injecting or popping the meds to the the willing patient, then involuntary where the unwilling, unknowing patient is just killed off is the natural trajectory of this act. You see this in the Netherlands where this act has been around much longer, and even in Oregon, this has already begun.

The assisted suicide laws there dampened everyones mood like a horror movie, and the suicide rate there is 6 times higher, the rise beginning after the passing of the bill. Among the assisted suicides, there could very well be family members giving to them or doctors but we do not know. Because the data that is extracted is what we term in public health as a data dump, generally useless, hard-to-monitor and statistically testy info, as it is dependent on doctors' voluntary reporting, which as the reports go, are terribly incomplete and sometimes even manufactured, as the doctors are not there, to oversee the death or to saw it with certainly, unlike a hospital death where their cancer or disease should be sought help from a variety of specialists, especially psychiatrists who would affirm the patient's value and treat transient depression in sickness in the elderly that comes with suicidal ideation but fades in two weeks, ironically the time it takes for a permanent, death giving prescription to be issued. Or even a medical examiner which would certify a toxicologic death in an assisted suicide with the manner befitting honesty--suicide and homicide, if they follow WHO, or as the Oregonians have requested, to have a special box that would capture the death as assisted suicide, because in one doctor's words, "It just had gotten to be so messy, make it stop."

Lawmakers have this special privilege of hearing and meeting the experts who work in fields related to their bill's content for free. New Jersey has this graced process of the public hearing. It gives people to hear reason and for them to gather what they feel is worthwhile and for the good of society and families. Our freedom is given so we may live and live well. And why do we live? Life is given for one purpose alone, which is to love and be loved. To chose to elude suffering through assisted suicide or suicide, same thing, is the not going to effect that goal because suffering will only increase. Whole families, then society. Do you think Netherlands find this law a gift? Doctors who do this act are burdened and admit, "it leaves a scar in my soul" each time they participate in a death. Their eldery carries cards "Do not kill" every time they go to a hospital. And do you think that is followed? No. That is why their quality of life is also poor. There is widespread distrust, not just between doctor and patient, whose care, cure and wellbeing should a matter of restful trust on the healthcare provider, but that is impossible now.

The society has been poisoned, healthcare has been poisoned. When we create murderers from the healers, we had returned society to the primitive stage where the shaman carries the blessing and the curse, instead of the healers solely dedicated for the healing, for the advocacy for the poor, sick, disabled and elderly. All the 72 acute care hospitals where you yourself will go, or the nursing homes where you will send your parents or loved ones or perhaps yourself, will be a place of danger and insecurity, if you approve this bill. This is plain in simple from the archives of history, from the vivid and available examples of states and countries that have gone the unholy passage of treating the cry of suicide as a cry for patient rights, for fulfillment of those rights, ignoring the fact that suicidal ideation or language is a cry of mentally unstable persons needing intervention (i.e. more love) for them to tide over that desparate, uncared for feeling. If one passes this bill, death no bounds, because as one Compassion and Choices doctor said, "it just is a technical issue, you just compute the dose." The speaker doesn't care for the patient at all, sees him or her as a horse to get a lethal dosage and goodbye. He doesn't see the patient as a human being, carrying a soul, a spark of immortality, a bearer of emotion and reason and memory. A person like him.

This is the inhuman mindset of the people at Compassion and Choices. In no way should they be given the chance to dictate the state's laws on end-of-life, medical societies' Hippocratic mandate or palliative care's powers and patient's basic rights to the primun non nocere --first ,do no harm--dictum of medicine.

Heal, not kill, is easy enough to understand.