If you are getting creeped out by the sudden surge of states decriminalizing assisted suicide, I'm with you. That's why I salute Barbara Kay who, concerned over the bill pending in Quebec to decriminalize euthanasia, pens a memo to her children
I do not want to be bumped off. I can't state the case more unequivocally than that. I don't care if I am a "burden" to you (you were once to me, that's how life works); I don't care how long it takes me to die, and how inconvenient that is to the medical system; and I don't care how selfless an example other parents are setting in graciously exiting the world for their dependents' sake before nature intended.
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M y deathbed physician should be familiar with a 2002 John Hopkins University study indicating that although 45% of terminally ill cancer subjects voiced a wish to die (i.e., subjects meeting the standards of Bill C-384), the wish turned out to be transient in all but 8% of the cases. If all 45% had been euthanized, we wouldn't know that. So even if I say I want to die, take that as a cry for comfort, reassurance or pain relief, which it almost certainly will be.
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Do not fall for any claptrap about what "your mother would have wanted." Read my lips: Your mother does not want to be made to feel it is her duty to die before nature decrees, so that others may be freed from care and responsibility, a subtle shift that inevitably follows upon an established "right."
Mind, your mother is no martyr. If it's hopeless, no heroic measures, please. Oh yes, and she wants to die as painlessly as possible. If this means raiding the entire arsenal of available analgesics and even sedatives whose side effect is to facilitate an easier death, so be it.
Intention is all. I want an unequivocal healer-patient dynamic with my doctor. His or her intention should be to kill my pain, not me. Finally, my doctor should be well versed in palliative care techniques, improving all the time.
Parents in England might want to do the same. Oh, and parents in Oregon, Washington, Montana New Hampshire,
you too.
While lawmakers call it assisted suicide for the terminally ill (aren't we all?), Wesley Smith calls it The Creeping Culture of Euthanasia.
N.B. The Hemlock Society has rebranded itself Compassion and Choices. This is the group who wrote the end-of-life planning tool, "Your Life, Your Choices" for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to hand out to veterans. Jim Towey, the lawyer who, after volunteering with Mother Teresa, drafted Five Wishes about end-of-life decisions with over 13 million in circulation, called the VA guide "fatally flawed" with the underlying message Your Life Is Not Worth Living