Mass: Inclusion Key in anti suicide drive

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/nov/14/inclusion-key-in-anti-suicide-drive/#disqus_thread

By Valerie Richardson, The Washington Times, November 14, 2012

The anti-euthanasia movement found new life last week after voters in Massachusetts defied the conventional wisdom by rejecting a physician-assisted suicide initiative.

In a setback for the “aid in dying” movement, Question 2, known as the Death With Dignity initiative, lost by a margin of 51 percent to 49 percent after leading by 68-to-20 in a poll released in early September by the Boston Globe.

The turnaround came after the “No on 2” camp fractured the liberal coalition that approved similar measures in Oregon and Washington by building a diverse campaign of religious leaders, medical professionals and advocates for the disabled along with a few prominent Democrats and a member of the Kennedy clan.

"Compassion & Choices is a successor organization to the Hemlock Society"

http://helenair.com/news/opinion/readers_alley/assisted-suicide-law-could-lead-to-patient-mistreatment/article_32bac11c-4985-11e2-9338-0019bb2963f4.html?print=true&cid=print

12/19/12

Theresa Schrempp Seattle, Wash.

I am a lawyer in Washington State where assisted-suicide is legal. Robert Zimorino’s letter encourages readers to contact Compassion & Choices, a promoter of assisted-suicide (“aid in dying”).

Your readers should know that Compassion & Choices is a successor organization to the Hemlock Society, originally formed by Derek Humphry. In 2011, Humphry was the keynote speaker at Compassion & Choices’ annual meeting here in Washington State.  In 2011, he was also in the news as a promoter of mail-order suicide kits from a company now shut down by the FBI.This was after a 29 year old man used one of the kits to commit suicide.

In 2007, Compassion & Choices was a plaintiff in Montana’s assisted-suicide case. Therein, Compassion & Choices requested legalization of assisted-suicide for “terminally ill adult patients.” The definition of this phrase was broad enough to include an otherwise healthy 18 year old who is insulin dependent or a young adult with stable HIV/AIDS. Such persons can live for decades with appropriate medical treatment.

Once someone is labeled “terminal,” an easy justification can be made that their treatment should be denied in favor of someone more deserving. Those who believe that legalizing assisted-suicide will promote free choice may discover that it does anything but.

Supporting authority not included in the published letter, below:

Massachusetts: Support withered for assisted-suicide ballot question

http://www.lowellsun.com/todaysheadlines/ci_22157064/support-withered-assisted-suicide-ballot-question#ixzz2Egbgwy23

 

By Chris Camire, ccamire@lowellsun.comlowellsun.com

Updated:   12/09/2012 07:15:07 AM EST

In late September, polls showed a ballot initiative that would make physician-assisted suicide legal for terminally ill patients had support from 68 percent of Massachusetts voters. 

Over the next month, that support steadily eroded, and on Election Day the measure failed by a razor-thin 51-49 percent margin. 

How did a proposal that seemed sure to pass just five weeks before the election come up short? 

Joseph Baerlein, president of Rasky Baerlein Strategic Communications, who handled public relations for the Committee Against Physician Assisted Suicide, said the measure's opponents had to convince voters who supported the idea of assisted suicide that the bill before them was flawed. 

"We focused our campaign strategy on looking at those weaknesses," said Baerlein. "For us to have a chance to win, we would have to have some amount of voters who felt it was their right take another look, so they would see that this wasn't the right way to do it."

The Death with Dignity Act, or Question 2, mirrored legislation passed in Oregon and Washington state.

Elder financial abuse 'more brazen and diverse,' deputy DA says

http://www.sddt.com/Commentary/article.cfm?Commentary_ID=10&SourceCode=20121120tbc&_t=Elder+financial+abuse+more+brazen+and+diverse+deputy+DA+says#.UKwio-SxzTo 

By GEORGE CHAMBERLIN, Executive Editor

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Paul Greenwood is a great crime fighter. In particular, in his role as a deputy district attorney in San Diego, he heads up the elder abuse prosecution unit.  That's why he was invited to testify last week at a hearing in Washington, D.C., called by the Senate Special Committee on Aging, titled, “America’s Invisible Epidemic: Preventing Elder Financial Abuse.”

Greenwood said at least 65 percent of his office’s prosecutions involve some form of financial exploitation.

“The conduct of the criminals is becoming more brazen and diverse," Greenwood testified. "The perpetrators are constantly developing new ways to gain access to our seniors’ life savings and have focused upon a generation that typically has been more trusting and less able or willing to self-report the victimization.”

That hesitancy makes it difficult to determine the size of the crimes.

“While the costs associated with elder financial abuse are estimated at $2.9 billion each year, financial abuse often goes unrecognized because victims are too afraid or embarrassed to report the crime to authorities,” said Sen. Herb Kohl, chairman of the committee.

Man convicted of murder "claimed his mother committed suicide"

http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/western-australia/man-convicted-of-murdering-his-mother/story-e6frg13u-1226522829658

A 27-YEAR-old Perth man has been found guilty of murdering his mother to steal her money and property.

Brent Donald Mack, 27, was on trial in the WA Supreme Court accused of murdering his mother, Ah Bee, between December 18 and 29 in 2008.

Ms Mack, 56, who also went by the name of Pauline, was last seen alive in September 2008, but her body has never been found.

In a police interview earlier this year, Mack claimed his mother committed suicide and had asked him not to tell anyone.

Justice John McKechnie, who presided the case without a jury, returned the guilty verdict today.

A psychiatric report and psychological report were ordered.

Mack will be sentenced on January 25.

Winning in Massachusetts: Inclusion was Key

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/nov/14/inclusion-key-in-anti-suicide-drive/#disqus_thread

By Valerie Richardson, The Washington Times, November 14, 2012

The anti-euthanasia movement found new life last week after voters in Massachusetts defied the conventional wisdom by rejecting a physician-assisted suicide initiative.

In a setback for the “aid in dying” movement, Question 2, known as the Death With Dignity initiative, lost by a margin of 51 percent to 49 percent after leading by 68-to-20 in a poll released in early September by the Boston Globe.

The turnaround came after the “No on 2” camp fractured the liberal coalition that approved similar measures in Oregon and Washington by building a diverse campaign of religious leaders, medical professionals and advocates for the disabled along with a few prominent Democrats and a member of the Kennedy clan.

Those who are not dying can be lured to assisted suicide

http://bostonglobe.com/opinion/letters/2012/11/02/those-who-are-not-dying-can-lured-assisted-suicide/mYhNV8k6hWseAFwSxdCnIL/story.html

I am a cancer doctor in Oregon, where physician-assisted suicide is legal. Oregon's assisted-suicide law applies to patients predicted to have less than six months to live. This does not necessarily mean that such patients are dying.

In 2000, I had a cancer patient named Jeanette Hall. Another doctor had given her a terminal diagnosis of six months to a year to live.  This was based on her not being treated for cancer. At our first meeting, she told me that she did not want to be treated, and that she wanted to opt for what our law allowed - to kill herself with a lethal dose of barbiturates.

I did not and do not believe in assisted suicide. I informed her that her cancer was treatable and that her prospects were good. But she wanted "the pills."  She had made up her mind, but she continued to see me. On the third or fourth visit, I asked her about her family and learned that she had a son. I asked her how he would feel if she went through with her plan. Shortly after that, she agreed to be treated, and her cancer was cured. 

Several years later she saw me in a restaurant and said, "Dr. Stevens, you saved my life."

For her, the mere presence of legal assisted suicide had steered her to suicide.

I urge the citizens of Massachusetts to vote no on Question 2.

Dr. Kenneth Stevens

Sherwood, Ore

Killing with kindness: Why the Death With Dignity Act endangers people with disabilities

http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/146648-killing-with-kindness-why-the-death-with-dignity-/#ixzz2AvS5wlXH

 

By S.J. Rosenbaum

I think my opinions about doctor-assisted suicide crystallized the night Mike — my wheelchair-using, ventilator-breathing boyfriend — choked on pineapple juice, passed out, and died.

He was dead for several minutes, on a steel table in the ER. The doctor shocked the pulse back into his heart and dropped him into an induced coma, but it still wasn't clear whether he would make it. As I stood by his bedside, shaking, one of the nurses touched me on the shoulder.

"Maybe it's better this way," she murmured.

I'll never forget that moment. We'd been watching a movie together a few hours before. We had plans to go clubbing. Maybe it's better this way?

I'm not a violent person, but I wanted to punch that lady in the face.

When I started going out with Mike, I thought that prejudice against people with disabilities was something we'd left behind along with Jim Crow and sodomy laws. I was shocked, again and again, to find that I was wrong. So wrong. Everyone I met had ideas about what it must be like to date Mike — that we never went out, that we couldn't have sex, that I must have to take care of him all the time — that were so false as to be laughable. We did laugh at that stuff. We had to. But for every person who came up to us to congratulate Mike on his "bravery" in taking a trip to the mall, there was someone who actually thought he'd be better off dead.

Some of those people were doctors.

Not the young doctor who fought like a demon to restart his heart in the ER. But there were others: well-meaning doctors who saw Mike, and people like him, as pitiable — as "bad outcomes." In fact, that's the norm: study after study has shown that doctors, as a group, consistently underestimate the quality of life of their disabled patients. Those prejudices — unquestioned and unacknowledged — can have disastrous results.

I don't know anyone born with a serious disability whose doctors didn't tell their parents that they would never be able to live independently. A doctor at Mass General, who treats children with muscular dystrophy, told me about colleagues who had counseled their patients against using the ventilators that would prolong their lives by decades. Those doctors weren't trying to do harm. They simply saw their patients' lives as not worth living.

As disability activist Carol Gill writes: "Many of us have been harmed significantly by medical professionals who knew little about our lives, who thought incurable functional impairments were the worst things that could happen to a person, and who were confident they knew best."

All this, then, is why I'll be voting against referendum Question 2, the Death with Dignity Act, on November 6.


The language of the bill sounds reasonable: it would allow doctors to prescribe lethal doses of medication, upon request, to patients with terminal diseases. But it wouldn't actually have much benefit for the dying, who already have the same access to self-administered suicide as anyone else. Instead, it could present doctors with an option to offer the patients they think they can't help: the bill's definition of "terminal disease" is so vague as to encompass disabilities like Mike's, and it has no requirement that a person seeking the fatal dose see a counselor or be screened for depression.

So why would a person with a disability ask for a suicide pill? My ex never would. Disabled from birth, Mike has been fighting for his rights since he was in grade school. He's a badass with 60 tattoos, and he's not ready to die any time soon.

But for the late-disabled, it's different. People diagnosed with a progressive disease — MS, ALS, and other such dire acronyms — still carry the same prejudices they've held all their able-bodied lives. Often, they don't know anyone living a full, enjoyable life with disabilities, don't know such lives are possible. So if a doctor offers them an exit, they're all too likely to take it.

It's happened. One of the earliest right-to-die cases, in 1989, was that of David Rivlin, a spinal-cord-injury survivor. Isolated in a nursing home, cut off from meaningful work, unable to live independently on the meager assistance the state offered at the time, he demanded to die. "I don't want to live an empty life lying helplessly in a nursing home for another 30 years," he told a reporter.

No one offered him an alternative. "The nondisabled people around him assumed that when a person with such a disability said he would rather be dead, he was acting rationally," disability activist Paul K. Longmore wrote a few years after Rivlin's death. Neither Rivlin, nor other people with disabilities seeking "death with dignity," realized that they could have been fighting for the support to live, rather than the right to die. Longmore observed, "The only real aid the system offered any of them . . . was assistance in ending their lives."

It's not 1989 anymore. The disabled in Massachusetts have more access, and more agency, than those in almost any other state, and activists fought hard to make it that way. Disabled Bostonians are filmmakers, tattoo artists, psychologists, writers. They ride the T. They own houses and businesses. And like Mike and me, they fall in love.

But not everyone knows that those things are an option. And with Romney — a man who sees adequate health care as a privilege, not a right — on the same ballot as Question 2, all that progress is scarily close to rolling back. Now is the worst time to perpetuate the myth that death is better than disability.

Vote no on Question 2.

Read more: 

http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/146648-killing-with-kindness-why-the-death-with-dignity-/#ixzz2AvRHl7Jn

Assisted Suicide Users are Older People with Money

By Margaret Dore, Esq., Updated October 29, 2012

Users of assisted suicide in Oregon and Washington are overwhelmingly white and generally well-educated.[1]  Many have private insurance.[2]  Most are age 65 and older.[3]  Typically persons with these attributes are seniors with money, which would be the middle class and above, a group disproportionately at risk of financial abuse and exploitation.[4] 

In the United States, elder financial abuse costs elders an estimated $2.9 billion per year.[5] Perpetrators include strangers, family members and friends.[6]. The goals of financial abuse perpetrators are achieved "through deceit, threats, and emotional manipulation of the elder."[7]

The Oregon and Washington assisted suicide acts, and the similar Massachusetts proposal, do not protect users from this abuse. Indeed, the terms of these acts encourage abuse. These acts allow heirs and other persons who will benefit from an elder's death to actively participate in his or her lethal dose request.[8] There is also no oversight when the lethal dose is administered, not even a witness is required.[9] This creates the opportunity for an heir, or someone else who will benefit from the person's death, to administer the lethal dose to that person without his consent.[10]  Even if he struggled, who would know?

This is not to say that all persons who use the Oregon and Washington acts are subject to abuse or that their actions are not voluntary.  Rather, the Oregon and Washington acts do not protect such persons from abuse.  Neither will the Massachusetts proposal.

For more information about problems with the Massachusetts' proposal, click here and here. For a "fact check" on the proposal, click here.

[1] See the most current official report from Washington State, "Washington State Department of Health 2011 Death with Dignity Act Report, Executive Summary ("Of the 94 participants in 2011 who died, . . . 94% were white, non-Hispanic . . .75 percent had at least some college education"), available at http://www.doh.wa.gov/portals/1/Documents/5300/DWDA2011.pdf  See also the most current official report from Oregon, also for 2011 ("most [users] were white (95.6%) [and] well-educated (48.5% had at least a baccalaureate degree) . . .", available at http://public.health.oregon.gov/ProviderPartnerResources/EvaluationResearch/DeathwithDignityAct/Documents/year14.pdf
[2] See Washington's report in note 1, page 5, table 2 (46% had private insurance only, or a combination of private and Medicaid/Medicare).  See Oregon's report in note 1("patients who had private insurance (50.8%) was lower in 2011 than in previous years (68.0%). . ."
[3] See Washington's report in note 1, page 5, Table 2 (74% were aged 65 or older).  See Oregon's report in note 1, page 2 ("Of the 71 DWDA deaths during 2011, most (69.0%) were aged 65 years or older; the median age was 70 years").
[4]  Educated persons are generally financially better off than non-educated persons; persons with private insurance have funding to pay for it; seniors generally are well off.  See "Broken Trust:  Elders, Family, and Finances, a Study on Elder Financial Abuse Prevention, by the MetLife Mature Market Institute, the National Committee for the Prevention of Elder Abuse, and the Center for Gerontology at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, March 2009, Executive Summary, page 4 ("Elders’ vulnerabilities and larger net worth make them a prime target for financial abuse").
[5]  The Met Life Study of Elder Financial Abuse, " Crimes of Occasion, Desperation, and Predation Against America's Elders," June 2011, page 2, key findings ("The annual financial loss by victims of elder financial abuse is estimated to be at least $2.9 billion dollars, a 12% increase from the $2.6 billion estimated in 2008"). 
[6] Id.
[7] Id., page 3.
[8] See e.g. Margaret K. Dore, "'Death with Dignity': What Do We Advise Our Clients?," King County Bar Association, Bar Bulletin, May 2009; and Margaret K. Dore, Memo to Joint Judiciary Committee (regarding Bill H.3884, now Ballot Question No. 2), Section III
[9] Id.  See also entire proposed Massachusetts Act at http://choiceisanillusion.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/ma-initiative.pdf
[10]  The drugs used, Secobarbital and Pentobarbital, are water and alcohol soluable, such that they can be injected without consent, for example, to a sleeping individual.  See "Secobarbital Sodium Capsules, Drugs.Com, at  http://www.drugs.com/pro/seconal-sodium.html  If the person wakes up and trys to fight, who would know? 

UK govt agrees to investigate "death pathway"

Article below regarding abuse of the Liverpool Pathway, from Michael Cook of Bio Edge.

A problem also in the US and Canada.  See, for example, Kate Kelly's article about her mother and "VSED" by clicking here

With some doctors abusing the power they already have with the Liverpool Pathway, etc., why would you give them more power to effect patient death, i.e., by legalizing assisted suicide and/or euthanasia?

The problem will only get worse.

* * *

http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/10293
by Michael Cook | Oct 27, 2012 |

Pressure from the British media has forced an investigation into the controversial Liverpool Care Pathway by National Health Service and the Association of Palliative Medicine.

The medical establishment appears very reluctant to question the LCP. Only a few days ago 22 organisations signed a consensus statement supporting it. It quoted the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Health, Earl Howe:

"The Liverpool Care Pathway has sometimes been accused of being a way of withholding treatment, including hydration and nutrition. That is not the case. It is used to prevent dying patients from having the distress of receiving treatment or tests that are not beneficial and that may in fact cause harm rather than good."

But the campaign by the Daily Mail and the Telegraph has been relentless. "When well over 100,000 are dying on the LCP each year, the suspicion inevitably arises that the pathway is being used to hasten death and free up beds," said the Daily Mail in an editorial.

Neurologist Patrick Pullicino contends that the LCP has made euthanasia a "standard way of dying on the NHS". He and his supporters were scathing about the consensus statement: 

"It is self-evident that stopping fluids whilst giving narcotics and sedatives hastens death... The median time to death on the Liverpool Care Pathway is now 29 hours. Statistics show that even patients with terminal cancer and a poor prognosis may survive months or more if not put on the LCP."

The investigation coordinated by the NHS will examine poor experiences under the LCP, which everyone acknowledges do happen. The NHS will talk to family members of people who have died on the pathway, investigate complaints and speak with clinicians. "Poor experiences must be explored, acknowledged and learnt from," says Professor Mayur Lakhani, Chair of the Dying Matters Coalition.

Will the investigation result in a thorough revision of the LCP? Even though the medical establishment admits that there are problems, it may not admit that they are due to the basic framework. The Consultant Nurses in Palliative Care Reference Group is already interpreting criticisms as dangerous and offensive. "Counter-productive comments", it says, are "deeply offensive to public servants who abide by clear codes of conduct and the law".