Assisted suicide reaches State House

Recently the Vermont legislature has been considering a bill (S.77) that would legalize the practice of “death with dignity,” or “patient-directed dying,” or some other misleading euphemism conjured up by evidently abashed legislators.

Make no mistake: the bill would make killing another person legal, under the name of “compassion.”

The aforementioned bill states that a patient afflicted with a “terminal” illness, that is, an illness that affords its host less than six months to live, may be legally killed by a doctor, if they request medication to “hasten death.”

 

You probably hear appeals for state-approved suicide similar to this one all the time. But whatever the case, the amount of time a patient is told he has to live is irrelevant.

 

Medical experts admit that it is nearly impossible to predict when a patient will die of an illness. Moreover, some people diagnosed with a “terminal condition” do not die for years, and sometimes not at all (at least not of that particular condition).

 

The fact of the matter is that nobody can accurately predict when one’s life becomes meaningless.

Euthanasia ideologues say legalizing assisted suicide would lower healthcare costs, as the drugs used to end a patient’s life are much cheaper than the drugs used to preserve it. This is not an ethically based argument. It argues that there is money to be saved by killing a patient, rather than actually helping one.

 

Advocates of euthanasia are naive if they do not believe that health-care providers won’t urge—or pay—doctors to, in turn, urge their patients to choose suicide over treatment.

 

Doctors might exaggerate the severity or dreadfulness of the ailment, as it would be in their financial interest to do so. Patients would be mindlessly receptive of a doctor’s deceptive advice, for people are unlikely to disagree with an expert.

 

Oregon, which has already legalized assisted suicide, has similarly witnessed this “profits over people” mentality.

 

Not long after the passage of the euthanasia bill, Oregon announced that it would make severe cuts to its state version of Medicaid. Oregon didn’t use the money they saved to increase the quality of their healthcare; rather, the state pocketed the money.

 

The next fallacy in the argument of euthanasia advocates: that the choice to die would be strictly voluntary. It is foolish to deny the pressures that would exist to encourage a patient to choose death.

Poorer patients would be especially encouraged to choose death, lest they perceive themselves financial burdens to family members.

 

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Assisted suicide reaches State House