Showing posts with label physician-assisted suicide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label physician-assisted suicide. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Twenty-Three Years Later: Oregon's Death with Dignity Act

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Oregon_State_Capitol_rotunda.jpgBy Margaret Dore, Esq.

This article is based on a legal analysis I wrote for a case in South Africa. I hope that you find it helpful. To read my original analysis, please click herehere and here.

I.   OVERVIEW

Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act was passed by a ballot measure in 1994 and went into effect in 1997.[1] The Act had been and is also currently promoted as a type of voluntary physician-assisted suicide.[2] The Act, in fact, also allows euthanasia, on both a voluntary and involuntary basis. 

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Oregon Doctor Pitched Assisted-Suicide

"Assisted Suicide? 'I was afraid to leave my husband alone again with doctors and nurses'”

Letter from Oregon resident, Kathryn Judson, Published in the Hawaii Free Press, February 15, 2011 (Click here and scroll down to the bottom of the page to view the original letter).

Dear Editor,

Hello from Oregon.

When my husband was seriously ill several years ago, I collapsed in a half-exhausted heap in a chair once I got him into the doctor's office, relieved that we were going to get badly needed help (or so I thought).

To my surprise and horror, during the exam I overheard the doctor giving my husband a sales pitch for assisted suicide. 'Think of what it will spare your wife, we need to think of her' he said, as a clincher.

Now, if the doctor had wanted to say 'I don't see any way I can help you, knowing what I know, and having the skills I have' that would have been one thing. If he'd wanted to opine that certain treatments weren't worth it as far as he could see, that would be one thing. But he was tempting my husband to commit suicide. And that is something different.

I was indignant that the doctor was not only trying to decide what was best for David, but also what was supposedly best for me (without even consulting me, no less).

We got a different doctor, and David lived another five years or so. But after that nightmare in the first doctor's office, and encounters with a 'death with dignity' inclined nurse, I was afraid to leave my husband alone again with doctors and nurses, for fear they'd morph from care providers to enemies, with no one around to stop them.

It's not a good thing, wondering who you can trust in a hospital or clinic. I hope you are spared this in Hawaii.

Sincerely,

Kathryn Judson, Oregon