By Dave Andrusko
I just received a media alert from the absurdly named “Compassion and Choices,” celebrating what it expects will be final adoption tomorrow by the Council of the District of Columbia of B21-38 which would legalize physician-assisted suicide in the nation’s capital .
NRL News Today has run several stories about the measure which is very important to the pro-assisted suicide movement led by Compassion and Choices, formerly known as the Hemlock Society.
Following the preliminary 11-2 vote, the Washington Post explained why: “It is the first predominantly black community to legalize so-called ‘death with dignity,’ overcoming objections from some African American residents,” according to Fenit Nirappil.
And check out this quote for the ages from an earlier Post story:
Across the country, some of the most high-profile representatives of the right-to-die movement have been white, including the terminally ill California woman Brittany Maynard who publicized her decision to end her life on widely viewed YouTube videos and in national media appearances.
Most of the demonstrators at a recent rally outside the D.C. Council building for the “Death with Dignity” legislation were white.
“They are not people who look me,” said Leona Redmond, a 64-year-old longtime District community activist who has been organizing other African American seniors against the legislation.
But I also read today, “Don’t Let Assisted Suicide Come to the Nation’s Capital,” by Richard Doerflinger. Doerflinger captures the significance of the measure in his opening sentence: “DC’s assisted suicide bill is the most expansive and dangerous our country has yet seen.”
Mr. Doerflinger outlines and encapsulates many of the astute arguments NRLC’s Jennifer Popik, JD, has made on many occasions, both with respect to DC and to the country as a whole.
For example, abuses are built in the permissive language of laws legalizing physician-assisted suicide (also misleadingly labeled “Medical Aid in Dying” or, as it is in DC, “Death with Dignity”). As Doerflinger observes
It is amazing that the state reports provide any useful information at all. The Oregon and Washington laws create a closed system, in which all reporting is by the doctor who prescribes a lethal overdose of barbiturates to his patient. No one may question the truthfulness of this account. … Oregon’s law allows the doctor to falsify the certificate, reporting the patient’s underlying illness as the cause of death. Washington’s law requires him to do so.
Also, there is this assurance that physicians have some sort of magical insight that guarantees that the patient will die within six months. We all know examples of where these predictions were almost comically imprecise.
And, of course, because more and more people who are requesting “assistance” say they “feel they are becoming a ‘burden’ on others—an attitude encouraged by the law itself, which authorizes suicide prevention for everyone else but suicide ‘assistance’ for them”- the potential for elder abuse is virtually limitless .
Why is DC’s law even more dangerous than other proposals? Here’s Mr. Doerflinger’s explanation:
[T]he Council of the District of Columbia has labored to make DC’s bill the most expansive and dangerous thus far. The bill includes Washington state’s explicit requirement that doctors falsify the cause of death. More alarming still, it is designed to ensure that third parties can administer the lethal dose, effectively legalizing homicide. Departing from Oregon’s law, in half a dozen places the final DC bill has been amended to describe the patient’s key action as “ingesting” the overdose. The dictionary definition of “ingest” is to swallow or absorb. So there is no barrier to other people, such as coercive relatives, getting those pills into the patient’s body.
In short, the proposed law not only allows assisted suicide, it also carves out an exception to the law against homicide. It will allow murder of the sick and elderly, followed by a government-approved cover-up to hide the fact that any lethal action occurred.
We will keep you up to date on the Council’s final vote, whatever action Mayor Muriel Bowser takes, and what happens after that.