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Young Senior Elder Member
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 11,298
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Young Senior Elder Member
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 11,298
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That's a very interesting link Wish, thank you for posting it.
I'm sure that you remember we have the monster cancer in both our memory banks...your Mom and my brother. I wanted to put a pillow over his face to end his suffering but of course, I did not.
I found an interesting article by Patty Fischer, San Jose Mercury News, 11/29/06
"Aid in dying" a kinder image than suicide
The folks in the right-to-die movement would prefer we not use the S-word when talking about their cause.
Call it "death with dignity" or "aid in dying" they say.
Just don't call it "physician-assisted suicide". Too violent and tragic. Not at all what they have in mind.
"We're not talking about suicide, when a depressed person or a mentally ill person ends a life that could go on," said the Rev John Brooke. "A person who is terminally ill is already in the dying process."
Brooke, 75, is a United Church of Christ minister who got into what I'll call the aid-in-dying movement nearly 20 years ago, after watching a good friend die slowly and painfully from AIDS. I first got to know him in 1992 when he was pastor of Congregational Church of Belmont and campaigning for a "death with dignity" ballot measure in California. We talked for hours then about how technology aimed at prolonging life was actually prolonging death and about the right of the terminally ill to end their suffering.
I struggled with the issue and eventually wrote a wish-washy column in which I came out for the cause but against the ballot measure. I said it didn't include enough safeguards to assure that malevolent family members wouldn't use it to bump off their defenseless relatives.
The initiative would have made California the first state to legalize physician aid in dying, but it failed. In those days, crackpot Jack Kevorkian was the public face of the right-to-die movement. And powerful opponents like the Roman Catholic Church and the California Medical Association campaigned aggressively against it.
Two years later, Oregon passed a similiar law - but with more safeguards - and it took effect in 1997. this year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it despite the Bush administration's efforts to kill it.
Oregon's law has worked as Brooke and others hoped it would. Some people who are near death - 64 of them in 2005 - get lethal prescriptions from their doctors, and about half of those die from their diseases without ever taking the pills.
Last year, I heard from Brooke again. He'd retired from his Belmont church but not from his cause. The California Legislature was considering AB 651, a new death-with-dignity bill, and he was pushing it. By that time, Terri Schiavo had replaced Kevorkian as the issue's public face. Polls showed that 70 percent of Californians supported the right to die.
The Mercury News editorial board and several other major papers in the state supported the bill. Although opponents killed it agian, I figured it was only a matter of time before California followed Oregon's lead.
So when I heard from Brooke the other day, I was surprised that he wasn't pushing yet another bill. He just wanted to talk semantics.
In an age of marketing slogans and sound bites, he's alarmed that "physician-assisted suicide" is the most common term for his cause.
The workd 'suicide' is such a pejorative term," he said. "It makes a lot of difference in the public perception."
His allies have watched conservatives define what it means to be a patriot and a Christian. they have seen abortion-rights advocates struggle to prove they weren't pro-abortion or anti-life. Now the aid-in-dying forces have gone on the offensive.
In Oregon, the advocacy group Compassion & Choices recently persuaded the state to remove the word "suicide" from all references to the Death With Dignity law. Others have appealed to the Associated Press to make "aid in dying" the preferred term in its stylebook.
Death by any other name is still death. It's hard to look at, hard to talk about. Leaders of the death-with-dignity movement have forced us to talk about the importance of giving dying people comfort and, in the end, the right to end their pain.
And now they've given us the words we need.
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