Death with Dignity?

10 reasons why doctor-prescribed death is not compassionate care of the sick:

1. The option to end lives medically will make people less concerned about offering needed care to terminally ill patients
2. It will diminish people’s awareness of those needs
3. It will cause people to become less concerned for the sick, because their lives would already be considered not worth living
4. As a result sick people will suffer more both physically and emotionally while dying
5. The suffering sick will feel pressured into dying by doctors, insurance companies, and even their own families at a time when they most need and deserve love and care
6. The men and women who have served the common good all their lives will look on themselves as a burden on society and feel that suicide is expected of them
7. Members of minority groups who cannot afford good healthcare will be further oppressed by a system that will urge them to commit suicide as their most reasonable option
8. Legalized medical suicide will increase the rate of non-medical suicide in the general population, as has occurred in Oregon where suicide is the leading cause of death among 15 to 34 year olds (not the elderly)
9. Euthanasia is disregard for the dignity and importance of human life; hence it is disregard for, not care of the terminally ill
10. Suicide is always a tragedy, never a dignified death

Assisted suicide is a slippery slope to non-assisted suicide and to medical murder. Once it is legalized, it will not be limited to treatment for the terminally ill. Nor will it improve anyone’s quality of life. It will only promote a more entrenched culture of death in our society. The antidote is respect for life.

[photo credit]