Oregon Assisted Suicide Report: Deaths Increase, No Psychological Referrals
Salem OR (LifeNews.com) -- Oregon officials have released their tenth statewide report on the status of assisted suicide there and it found the number of people who died is on the rise. The report also showed the number of people getting drugs to use in taking their own lives is increasing as well. More people received lethal drugs from doctors to kill themselves than any previous year under the state's first-in-the-nation law legalizing assisted suicide. The report showed 85 people received the drugs (an increase of 20 from the year prior) while 49 people had their physicians help them kill themselves (up slightly from 2007). Three of the people who killed themselves in 2007 receive the prescription for the lethal cocktail in 2006. Since the Oregon assisted suicide law took effect, 341 patients have killed themselves. One leading euthanasia opponent, Rita Marker, of the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, said she's concerned doctors don't do more to help patients address the mental health issues that likely prompt them to consider suicide. "During 2007, not one patient who died under Oregon's assisted suicide law was referred for psychiatric or psychological evaluation before receiving the prescription for lethal drugs," she said. Full story at LifeNews.com.
I don't know why people think this is such a good idea. You can ask people in the Netherlands where it started, and what has happened since in the way of abuses of these kinds of cases. Not having a psych evaluation is definitely an abuse of this law. If we think suicidal people have mental health issues under normal circumstances, why is that different if they are dying?
I'd rather die well than this. I'm going to milk the only life I've got for all it's worth, suffering or not. Why is this ok? What if someone wasn't really sick and neglected to get a second opinion? What if someone were convinced by their family, the way some girls who get abortions are convinced by their families? What if they were convinced because it would save everyone money? That is very likely, considering home care costs, especially if one had Lou Gehrig's disease or something. And what if we then moved on to the severely disabled, just because they weren't productive members of society? It goes downhill fast once it starts, and I know I'm not exaggerating, because it's happened before and is happening now. Hitler's Germany was where this kind of thing ends up. It isn't alarmist to say so. It is stating the obvious.
Vote no if it comes on the ballot in Washington, or anywhere else.
