Category: News

Newsweek published this piece written by the Patients Rights Action Fund Executive Director, Matt Valliere, on the flaws in the New Mexico assisted suicide law. Below are excerpts – read the entire article at Newsweek.com.

“In the midst of a pandemic, the New Mexico state legislature ignored the needs of its constituents—many of whom lack basics like reliable electricity and running water, never mind basic medical care—in favor of passing a dangerous and discriminatory assisted suicide law. This and similar policies in other states have proven the failure of proponents to safeguard the people most susceptible to abuse, mistakes and coercion….

The New Mexico legislature had a critical chance to address the glaring issues in our health care system that the pandemic exposed. They could have increased access and education for patients, training in palliative and hospice care for medical professionals, expanded home health and personal care aid or family caregiver relief. Equal access to the gold standard of care should be top priority in both policy and medicine. Giving medical professionals immunity to assist in their patients’ suicide not only fails to address any of the system’s problems, but exacerbates the current disparities. The rest of us can avoid making the same mistake in other states by rejecting dangerous and discriminatory assisted suicide laws.”

Anita Cameron, NDY’s Director of Minority Outreach, testified to the Rhode Island Senate Judiciary Committee at its Zoom hearing on the state’s assisted suicide bill on Monday, April 26. In a brief two-and-a-half minutes, she shared her mother’s story of a very mistaken medical prognosis as well as opposition to assisted suicide in communities of color.

This testimony is from Not Dead Yet, which includes a video of Anita Cameron testifying.

Testimony of Anita Cameron in opposition to Rhode Island Bill S 775, April 26, 2021

Thank you, Madame Chair and members of the committee. My name is Anita Cameron. I’m Director of Minority Outreach for Not Dead Yet. It’s a national disability rights organization opposed to assisted suicide.

So I’m here to express opposition to S775. There are many reasons to oppose this bill and others like it. And here are some:

Number 1. This bill puts disabled, seniors and sick people in grave jeopardy. Doctors often make mistakes when determining people to be terminal. I know, my mother was determined to be terminal, yet survived almost 12 years after that diagnosis. She passed away on February 1st of this year.

Number 2. According to the Oregon report, the top five reasons that people request assisted suicide, which is loss of autonomy, loss of the ability to do activities that brought pleasure, loss of dignity, loss of control of bodily functions, and feeling of being a burden, are disability-related psychosocial issues that have not been effectively addressed, not pain or fear of it as proponents claim.

Number 3. According to various reports, Blacks in particular almost never request assisted suicide, especially if they’re poor. And that’s borne out in a Massachusetts referendum results that show that poor Blacks and Latines and Whites voted overwhelmingly against assisted suicide in that state. And in fact, around the nation, assisted suicide is requested almost entirely by wealthier, educated whites.

So bills like S775 are never safe. And rather than assisted suicide, people need effective treatment for their conditions, and services and support along with options like psychotherapy, palliative care, and palliative sedation. Death should never be an option in healthcare.

Thank you very much.

John Kelly’s Compelling Testimony Opposing Rhode Island Assisted Suicide Bill S0775

John Kelly testified to the Rhode Island Senate Judiciary Committee at its Zoom hearing on the state’s assisted suicide bill S-775 on Monday, April 26, 2021. Members of the public who testified were severely limited in the time allowed, so below is John’s excellent full written testimony, which is well worth the read. This testimony was originally posted at Not Dead Yet.

John B. Kelly
Testimony in strong opposition to S 775
 “Lila Manfield Sapinsley Compassionate Care Act”
Judiciary Committee

April 25, 2021

Chair Coyne, Vice Chair Archambault, Members of the Judiciary Committee:

I am the New England Regional Director for Not Dead Yet, the national disability rights group that has long opposed assisted suicide. I am also the Director of Second Thoughts Massachusetts: Disability Rights Advocates against Assisted Suicide.

Like all assisted suicide bills, S 775 puts people in danger of premature death. That’s because deadly mistakes and abuse are impossible to prevent, and the harm – wrongful death – impossible to reverse.

The bill is also divisive, putting the wishes of the wealthier, whiter classes of people above the objection of other communities. Black and Brown communities overwhelmingly oppose legalized assisted suicide, as do working-class white people. People who already receive later and less care will more likely be written off as having a low “quality of life” when they have the same symptoms that prompt more privileged people to seek assisted suicide.

The response to COVID-19 has laid bare the racism inherent in our broken medical system, such as the case of Michael Hickson, a black Texan quadriplegic with COVID-19, who was refused treatment because of his “quality-of-life.”

INSURERS: The bill, despite its promise of “end-of-life options,” ultimately takes choice away from people. That’s because real choice resides with insurers, whose profit-maximizing denials of prescribed treatments can make you terminal. Because assisted suicide is always the cheapest “treatment” available, it encourages insurers to reject traditionally covered treatments. That’s already happening in states where assisted suicide is legal.

Nevada Dr. Brian Callister reported a few years ago that two of his patients were denied routine treatments with 70 percent cure rates by their respective California and Oregon insurance companies.  They would only pay for hospice and assisted suicide. Shortly after assisted suicide became legal in California, Stephanie Packer, a young mother with scleroderma, was denied her prescribed treatment but learned that her assisted suicide copay would be $1.20.

MISTAKES. In 2014, CBS News reported that physician misdiagnosis affects 12 million Americans yearly, putting half at risk of severe harm. Studies show that 12%-15% of people who enter hospice outlive their six-month prognosis.

In its 2020 report, Oregon finally acknowledged the numbers of people who outlive their six-month terminal prognosis. In 23 years, 77 people or 4% of the total people with prescriptions have outlived their prognosis. That means that another group of people, probably more than 100,* cut short their lives out of misplaced trust in their doctors. That 4% figure happens to match the percentage of people sentenced to death who are innocent. That’s one of the main reasons that people oppose capital punishment. If those people’s lives are valuable enough to cause people to reject capital punishment, an even greater percentage of people who lose good years of their lives to assisted suicide should be reason enough to stop the practice.

TV star Valerie Harper was told incorrectly she had months to live because of brain cancer in early 2013. Yet Harper was nowhere near her “end of life.” If, based on the false information given to her, Valerie had exercised her “right” to aid in dying, she could have lost 6 good years of her life, which included starring in a play. She lived until the fall of 2019.

ABUSE: This committee should be skeptical when assisted suicide proponents talk of ideal, loving families, not when our news is full of the deeds of abusive, even murderous families and “friends.”

If S 775 passes, abusers and criminals will be offered a no-questions-asked opportunity to engineer someone’s death. Especially vulnerable will be the 10% of Rhode Island elders estimated to be abused every year, almost always by adult children and caregivers.

The Associated Press reported in 2013 that Oregon realtor

Tami Sawyer also faces charges of criminal mistreatment and theft as a result of a state charge that she stole more than $50,000 after a man [Thomas Middleton] who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease moved into her home, named her his estate trustee, deeded his home to a trust, and then died by physician-assisted suicide.

We have no idea how Thomas Middleton really died, but we do know that days later, Sawyer listed Middleton’s property and then stole some of the proceeds. Her crimes came to light, not through any program safeguards, but by a federal investigation into suspicious real estate transactions. The state did not bother to pursue its charges.

Suspicious circumstances like Middleton’s are not included in the Oregon reports. Even when there is evidence of abuse, Oregon has taken no action.

For example, Wendy Melcher died after being given massive doses of barbiturate suppositories by two nurses, one of whom was having an affair with Wendy’s partner. The nurses claimed that Wendy had requested assisted suicide, but she wasn’t even enrolled in the program! Nor did Wendy self-administer.

Yet instead of referring the nurses to authorities for criminal charges, the state nursing board secretly suspended one nurse’s license for 30 days and placed the other on two years “probation.” It took a reporter’s phone call years later to inform Wendy’s devastated family that she had been killed. It seems that the very existence of the assisted suicide law turned evidence of a serious crime into an excusable mistake. The Portland Tribune editorialized, “If nurses — or anyone else — are willing to go outside the law, then all the protections built into the Death With Dignity Act are for naught.”

Despite these examples and more, professional proponents continue to falsely claim that there hasn’t been a single instance of abuse in all the states practicing assisted suicide.

DISABILITY. As you will hear from both proponents and opponents of this bill, people do not make decisions in isolation. That’s especially true when people become disabled due to illness and need physical assistance from other people. When people do not have access to paid in-home caregivers, they are susceptible to feeling like a burden. Indeed, prescribing Oregon physicians reported last year that over 50% of program deaths stem in part from feelings of being a “burden on family and friends/caregivers.”

Proponents are always saying that the initiative must come from the patient, but let’s be real: if prescribing a deadly overdose is a beneficial “medical treatment,” doctors and nurses and family are going to be suggesting it.

Oregonian Kathryn Judson wrote of bringing her seriously ill husband to the doctor.  “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),” she wrote.  “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.”

A belief common among people thinking of suicide, whether “conventional” or assisted, is that their deaths will benefit others. The writers of S 775 pretend that as long as someone can “understand or appreciate the relevant facts necessary to make an informed decision,” they do not have “impaired judgment.”

The writers of the bill ignore the reality of depression, which does indeed impair judgment.
As Massachusetts mental health advocate Ruthie Poole has testified,

Those of us in MPOWER are very familiar with the insidious nature of depression. As a therapist once told me, depression does not cause black and white thinking; it causes black and blacker thinking. Absolute hopelessness and seeing no way out are common feelings for those of us who have experienced severe depression. Personally, as someone who has been suicidal in the past, I can relate to the desire for “a painless and easy way out.” However, depression is treatable and reversible. Suicide is not.

A lot of hearing testimony will describe deaths in which pain was not properly treated, but proponents have begun admitting that the emphasis on pain and suffering is a marketing ploy, because as leading assisted suicide practitioner Lonny Shavelson has said, “It’s almost never about pain.” Like Shavelson, former radio show host Diane Rehm emphasizes that assisted suicide is really about “dignity.”

Shavelson and Rehm both point to the Oregon reports, whose first five “end-of-life concerns” deal with “existential distress” (New England Journal of Medicine) over the disabling aspects of their serious illness, from depending on others for care to grief over lost abilities, loss of social status, incontinence, and feeling like a burden.

These reasons suggest a meaning of dignity that depends not on everyone’s inherent worth, but on an ability-based meritocracy. This sort of dignity is fragile and easily lost through disability.  The people whose suicides are informed by these views, proponents admit, tend to be wealthier, whiter, more educated, and people with a strong preference for control.  Their desire to hold onto this privilege must not justify a pro-suicide public policy that endangers everyone else.

The lives of non-terminal” disabled people share many traits with people requesting assisted suicide, but we reject as bizarre and dangerous the notion that personal dignity is somehow lost through reliance on others. That’s why for 50 years the disability rights movement has insisted on funded programs to provide necessary personal care attendant (PCA) services for all disabled people, including people disabled by their serious illness.

S 775 would set up a two-tier system, under which some people get suicide prevention services while others get suicide assistance. The difference between the two groups would be based on value judgments about so-called “quality of life.” Many of us already get told, straight to our face and through medical hostility, that we might be better off dead. Legalized assisted suicide makes that prejudice official policy.

That’s why every leading national disability rights group that has taken a position on assisted suicide has come out against it.

Let’s make sure that people have the choice and supports to live pain- and burden-free at home. As you consider S 775, please think about Rhode Island residents, elders and disabled people – including people disabled by their serious illness – who may be vulnerable and without the sort of support and control assisted suicide proponents take for granted, innocent people who will lose their lives because of this bad social policy.

Invidious quality-of-life judgments have no place in state policy. Please reject this bill and the discrimination it promotes. Thank you.

* Since studies show that 12%-15% of people who enter hospice outlive their six-month prognosis, the 4% who actually waited to take the lethal drugs and outlived their prognosis significantly underestimates the number who could have outlived their prognosis if they had similarly waited.

John B. Kelly
66 Fenway APT 22
Boston, MA 02115
617-952-3302

Opinion piece from the Connecticut Post by Joan Cavanaugh, April 1, 2021.

State needs health care, not “death with dignity”

Anyone who has been with loved ones facing serious, painful illness will empathize deeply with the testimonies in Ed Stannard’s Sunday, March 21 article. I have. And I do.

But as an anti-war, anti-death penalty, pro-choice, human rights advocate who has been compelled to fight attempts by the medical system to restrict and withhold treatment, I also contend that there is a much larger picture to be considered. As a society, we must make decisions to protect the lives of the most vulnerable among us, not place them in further danger. The relevance of these considerations is repeatedly ignored or denied by the proponents of bills such as HB 6425, currently before the Connecticut state Legislature in another attempt to make it legal for doctors to prescribe lethal drugs for their patients.

Specific provisions of HB 6425 are problematic in themselves: among others, the mandate that doctors lie about the cause of the patient’s death, listing the underlying illness only, not the ingestion of the lethal cocktail; the removal of qualifying restrictions from previous bills regarding who can serve as witnesses to the patient’s written request; and the fact that the primary care physician and the “consulting” physician can now share a practice. But the bill must also be viewed in its larger context.

The New York Times Magazine reported on May 3, 2020, that the slogan of Compassion and Choices, which avidly promotes this legislation nationwide, found its way onto a sign at a “You Can’t Close America!” super-spreader event for Trump supporters last spring in Austin, Texas. The faulty premise of “My life, my death, my choice,” present at that rally and in this legislation, is that individual decisions are made in a vacuum without impact on the larger community. While it may offer “choice” for the few, medical assisted suicide is an existential threat to the many.

Medical practitioners already pronounce judgment on a patient’s “quality of life” based upon personal preferences and prejudices combined with institutional mandates and insurance company imperatives to slash costs. The underlying social Darwinist mentality is never acknowledged, but the telling phrase “death with dignity” is often used, suggesting that the care required by many who are disabled, elderly or seriously ill demeans them and burdens caregivers and society. This repudiation of our human connection and responsibility to each another lies at the core of these bills, which contain the seeds of abuse, neglect and coercion.

To deny this and to dismissively state that we are “fighting a battle we don’t need to fight” is insulting and belittles the lived experiences of those who have been forced to constantly struggle against the medical system to get needed care for ourselves or our loved ones. My mother was a Medicare/Medicaid patient who suffered from dementia in her later years. I was browbeaten and harassed by many of her providers and other medical personnel who wanted me to “let her die.” Along with their pious mantras about “quality of life” and “death with dignity,” I was also told point blank by hospital administrators that they could not “afford” to keep treating her.

The longstanding, ugly reality of health care rationing for certain populations was made publicly visible by the COVID crisis: poor, disabled, elderly, Black and brown people already face lethal discrimination. How can proponents of medical assisted suicide now possibly doubt that it would morph into the only option available to those for whom potentially life-saving treatment is pronounced “futile” or deemed too expensive for hospitals and insurance companies to sustain? As a now-elderly person whose only insurance is Medicare, I do not want my cost-effective death, couched in someone else’s view of my diminished “quality of life,” to become the preferred (or only) “treatment” I am offered. Would you?

People coping with the pain and stress caused by a serious illness or disability are too often also forced to fight the medical system to get the care they need, if they even feel empowered to do so. When you have experienced this or witnessed it, you know it is as searing, heartbreaking and terrifying as the experiences described in Stannard’s article.

It would be unconscionable to introduce medical assisted suicide into this environment.

Instead of debating the merits of a bill to allow our doctors to kill us, the state Legislature must craft legislation to provide equitable, comprehensive and full treatment for everyone who wants it, including much improved palliative care (when freely chosen and needed.) These measures — not poison cocktails — are the way to move forward.

Joan Cavanagh lives in New Haven.

New Zealand has the End of Live Choice Act. This video outlines very clearly the dangers of this act, and would be the same dangers for our physician assisted suicide proposals. The pressures outlined are ones that people with disabilities are already very familiar with.

Unfortunately, this act passed in a binding referendum vote in October of 2020, and will be put in place in November of 2021. You can read more about the act: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_New_Zealand_euthanasia_referendum.