“Opponents of Death-with-Dignity (DWD) laws use several falsehoods in their attempts to prevent legislation from passing. We believe policy decisions affecting people with terminal illness should be made based on evidence and the actual content of the legislation.”
“New legislation and court judgments are further expanding access to MAID, some bringing new and different twists.”
As more states legalize PAD and the practice becomes more ethically accepted, it is important to determine a standard of care to guide physicians.
Advocates, supporters, and champions (of MAiD) need to decide if it is better to have a law that is less than ideal … or have no law at all? Is something better than nothing?
It’s time that we revise and refine our cultural lexicon around this emergent end-of-life practice. A medically assisted death definitively warrants a linguistic and conceptual category of its own.
The more “Final Exit” was condemned, the more people bought it who were not afraid to think about death.
After he died, Jean and her sister both looked at one other and said, “That’s how I’m going to die.”
“We reached the goal for patients like me, who aren’t terminal but degenerative, to win this battle, a battle that opens the doors for the other patients who come after me.”
The distress and pain that surrounds the suicide of a healthy person is different in kind and in degree from the distress and pain of the hastened death of a dying person. Vocabularies need to account for the difference between a killing and a death.
