Here’s Wesley Smith, writing in The National Review: http://www.nationalreview.com/human-exceptionalism
A few quotes, with which True Dignity heartily agrees:
The Brittany Maynard media explosion (my takes here and here) is an intense advocacy offensive–funded substantially by the culturally subversive George Soros through his support of Compassion and Choices–that is intended to do two things:
1. Drive assisted suicide into implementation by the power of hyper-emotion.
2. Silence those who want to discuss non-lethal approaches to caring for terminally ill patients in the larger context of the issues raised by Maynard’s illness.
Maynard–and more particularly, Compassion and Choices–are just trying to shut up voices they don’t want heard in the discussion by using her tragedy as a bludgeon.
Nobody is violating Maynard’s privacy. To the contrary: She and C & C are inserting her story into in every possible venue. That being so, people have every right to comment about the ISSUE presented–and that includes what hospice can do for people with brain cancer–as well as whether assisted suicide is appropriate or beneficent public policy.
People also have every right to opine about whether she is doing the right thing in her campaign and in deciding to take poison. She brought the issue up.
To put it bluntly, whether to legalize physician-prescribed suicide is about much more than Brittany Maynard’s individual circumstances, as tragic and emotionally compelling as that may be.
We do have one thing to add that Smith comes close to saying but does not actually say. Brittany Maynard asks that Dr. Byock stop saying she can have a peaceful death without taking poison, because, she says, he does not know her or her individual circumstances, as if they were not the exact same circumstances faced by every person dying of glioblastoma multiforme. In fact, Dr. Byock has seen many many people die with brain cancer, and he knows much more about how they die than Brittany and the ghoulish death pushers who are advising her to commit suicide. Even her doctors are not dying specialists like Dr. Byock. As Smith does say, he isn’t telling her a single thing except what hospice care can and does do for patients dying of brain cancer: good hospice care, that is, which is certainly not a guarantee except in the best centers, like the one headed by Dr. Byock. That’s in California, Brittany’s home state, from which she moved so she could commit suicide with assistance. Ironic.
