Assisted Suicide Poster Children

ferncohen.com

Here is why everyone is so scared of us. We are the poster children for assisted suicide!

Reprint of a posting I made last week on the "Living with ALS" message board:

All over the media, ALS is presented as a disease that warrants immediate euthanasia...we are flooded with images of Dr Kevorkian assisting patients with ALS to die "with dignity". Everywhere ALS provides justification for support of assisted suicide!
In today's Sault Star of Sault Ste. Marie Ontario, columnist Nadine Robinson writes:

"Should I ever be faced with Lou Gehrig's disease, or ALS, and my perfectly functional brain becomes a prisoner of a body turning to stone, I'd be looking into Zurich-based Dignitas. If my mind stopped functioning properly, I'd be none the wiser and would be unconcerned, but I would only hope that I wouldn't burden my family too long."

for entire article, follow this url
http://www.saultstar.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1070476

on a recent episode of the TV show "House", Dr. House was ruminating about whether to save a patient from death and said "if he has ALS, he can expect a painful death, so maybe he should get out of his misery now"

On another primetime drama whose name I do not recall, one of the characters relayed that the mother of a friend had just been diagnosed with ALS, and says that the woman "wants to die now before she becomes a "locked-in burden to the family"

Perhaps the reason we are feared and make people uncomfortable around us [I even detect some anger from others when I am around] is that we are constantly presented in the media as someone who is going to die anyway, in misery, and better off dead, sooner rather than later.

I am going into my 5th year of this disease, am NOT a burden to my family, who live 20 miles away, and want to live as long as possible. Sure, I would never have chosen this, and life is not easy. But there are some of us doing remarkable things, yet the media portrays us as inutile burdens to society who should be euthanized. It's totally Hitler-ish!!

We need to do all we can to show that we continue to contribute to society even after ALS, are not writhing miserably in pain, and not all waiting for the grim reaper to deliver us from misery


and here is an article from the Associated Press

Assisted Suicide; Good or Bad?
Washington state mulls assisted suicide measure

By RACHEL LA CORTE
The Associated Press




OLYMPIA, Wash. - There isn't much John Peyton can do on his own except speak, and soon he'll lose even that.

The former Boeing computer programmer has Lou Gehrig's disease, which progressively paralyzes its victims. His doctor gives him three to six months to live.

He is using his last months to oppose a ballot initiative that would allow physicians in Washington state to help terminally ill patients end their lives. Only Oregon has such a law.

"What we're really doing I believe, is attempting to eliminate the sufferer so we don't have to deal with them," Peyton said.

Supporters need to collect about 225,000 valid voter signatures by July 3 to get the "Washington Death with Dignity Initiative" on the November ballot. The campaign has raised more than $1 million, more than enough for a successful signature drive, setting up a fiercely fought and emotional campaign.

Those in favor of the measure say that it's not meant to encourage people to prematurely end their lives.

"They are realistically accepting that their death is imminent," said Barbara Coombs Lee, president of the Portland-based group Compassion and Choices, part of the coalition supporting the initiative. "Knowing that, they want to protect themselves from unnecessary and unbearable suffering."

Outside Oregon, advocates of the idea haven't fared well. California, Michigan and Maine voters rejected the idea, and bills have failed in statehouses around the country. In Washington, voters rejected physician-assisted suicide in 1991.