The idea suggested by some disability rights advocates, that most of us will be disabled in one way or another by the time we reach the end of our lives, has been borne out in my experience. Virtually everyone I have known who has died has met, days or weeks or months before their deaths, the definition of disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act. How can we assure that those who are disabled are not coerced into ending their lives too soon?
Understanding disagreements between DWD advocates and disability rights advocates may be a way to find some common ground between the two groups. This is Part 1 of a multi-part series exploring the issues.
Developments since 1997 in accepted medical practice regarding voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED) and terminal sedation (TS) warrant fresh claims that state exclusion of lethal assistance to a competent, fatally stricken patient is so arbitrary as to violate equal protection of the laws under state and federal constitutions. While the prevailing jurisprudence for the past 20 years has upheld state bans on lethal poisons as a mode of protecting a vulnerable population (dying patients) against abuse or mistake, there are at least 2 cogent counter arguments in any renewed constitutional debate.
All of the Death With Dignity (DWD) laws now in the US are modeled after the Oregon law that went into effect in 1997. The other jurisdictions that have adopted such a law include Washington, Vermont, Washington, D.C., Colorado, California, and Hawaii. A judicial decision in Montana allows DWD to be practiced with cooperating doctors.
Missing from all of these laws is the right of people who have specific kinds of incurable, debilitating, painful, or extremely distressing medical conditions, but are not necessarily within six months of dying, to use these laws.
We’ve received a question from a reader which we believe would be of general interest. The writer asks:
“How does FEN President Janis Landis know there is no air hunger with nitrogen inhalation onset? Is this an assumption, inference, observation, result of experimentation? Please clarify.”
The POLST — or Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment — Paradigm has become a powerful tool for identifying and honoring the goals of care of seriously ill or frail individuals. But that power can be turned against patients if health care providers misunderstand or misuse it. Each of these seven deadly sins require resolute reconsideration for redemption.
The American Association of Suicidology recognizes that the practice of physician aid in dying, also called physician assisted suicide, Death with Dignity, and medical aid in dying, is distinct from the behavior that has been traditionally and ordinarily described as “suicide,” the tragic event our organization works so hard to prevent. Although there may be overlap between the two categories, legal physician assisted deaths should not be considered to be cases of suicide and are therefore a matter outside the central focus of the AAS.
No, it is not an obituary for a specific individual. It is an obituary that recognizes and celebrates taking control of one’s end-of-life suffering.
On April 16, 2018, the Final Exit Network (FEN) filed a lawsuit in federal district court against the State of Minnesota. The suit asks the court to declare that Minnesota’s law prohibiting speaking to a person about how to hasten her own death is a violation of the free speech clause of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The suit seeks, also, to void FEN’s conviction under the statute, and to bar the State of Minnesota from again initiating a prosecution of FEN, and its personnel, under the statute based solely on the utterance of “speech” that “enables” a suicide.
Timothy Boon, RN, is the CEO of Good Shepherd Community Care (GSCC) in Newton, MA. GSCC is an independent, community-based, not-for-profit, non-sectarian, hospice care agency, the first organized in Massachusetts 40 years ago. Recently, he wrote a poem in the style of Dr. Seuss, and recited it on video for ZDoggMD (otherwise known as Dr. Zubin Damania, Founder of Turntable Health, a direct primary care clinic in downtown Las Vegas). The poem is posted here by permission of the author. The video is posted courtesy of ZDoggMD.
