Massachusetts voters get to choose if they will allow their fellow citizens to control their lives on Tuesday by voting on a bill to decide whether to legalize physician-assisted suicide.
The proposed measure allows terminally ill patients to be given access to lethal drugs. A terminally ill patient is defined as someone with six months or less to live. The patient’s terminal diagnosis and mental competency must be attested to by two doctors. Patients would have to make a request to their doctor twice orally and once in writing. The written request would have to be witnessed.
I live in Oregon, one of the two states, including Washington, that allows me to determine my own fate. I think that this should be my right. If I am terminally ill and or in insurmountable pain, then I should be allowed to ask to be offed.
You should be in control, right? Well, no according to the medical profession.
The American Medical Association “strongly opposes any bill to legalize physician-assisted suicide” because the practice is “fundamentally inconsistent with the physician’s role as healer.” The Massachusetts Medical Society also opposes the bill. “Allowing physicians to participate in assisted suicide would cause more harm than good,” … “Physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer.”
I think that doctors are confused about where their role and my rights intersect. They suggest that they have the right to keep me living like a pained vegetable because, well because they say so.
And then there is this TV commercial from a secretly funded PAC that uses a pharmacist (cute actor) to lend a bit of scare into the equation.