This article, by Marilyn Golden, Senior Policy Analyst of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, appeared on CNN October 14, 2014.
Golden writes: “At less than $300, assisted suicide is, to put it bluntly, the cheapest treatment for a terminal illness. This means that in places where assisted suicide is legal, coercion is not even necessary. If life-sustaining expensive treatment is denied or even merely delayed, patients will be steered toward assisted suicide, where it is legal.” Furthermore, “No safeguards have ever been enacted or proposed that can properly prevent this outcome, one that can never be undone.” With regard to so-called safeguards in existing laws , she asserts that “in practical terms, they provide no protection”, citing as an example the case of Michael Freeland of Oregon, whose guns, but not his suicide drugs, were taken away from him after he was hospitalized with an outbreak of the depression from which he had suffered for many years.
True Dignity agrees with her that no imaginable benefit is worth the enormous risks legal assisted suicide presents to people made vulnerable by age, disability, or mental or physical illness.
Read the article here: http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/13/opinion/golden-assisted-suicide/
