Doctors Should Heal Patients, Not Kill Them. Assisted Suicide Makes Us Agents of Death.

September 26, 2019

(USA Today) -At first blush, this seems unfathomable, even in a country where euthanasia is legal. But the fact is that a few years prior, she had requested to be euthanized if her dementia worsened — a wish her family felt obligated to honor over and against her more recent protests. In order to inject the lethal drug, the doctor had to secretly sedate her, and her family had to hold her down. Many proponents of physician-assisted suicide insist that these sorts of euthanasia mishaps will never happen in the United States. Euthanasia — typically by lethal injection — is illegal in America. By contrast, assisted suicide is legal in a handful of states. Doctors write the prescriptions for deadly pills that patients self-ingest. Although advocates contend that assisted suicide is safe from euthanasia’s abuses, nothing could be further from the truth.