Word: physicians
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...enough, but it comes after a similar ruling last month by the Ninth Circuit Court in San Francisco, also one of the nation's most influential appeals courts. Unless the Supreme Court reverses both decisions--and there's no guarantee it will even hear the cases--the laws against physician-assisted suicide now on the books in a majority of states may be on their way out. "In the past 30 days there have been more developments in this field than there have been in the previous 20 years," says University of Michigan law professor Yale Kamisar...
...good argument for keeping the practice illegal? No, says Grossman: "It's incredibly arrogant to say nobody's going to be careful so we shouldn't let patients make this decision for themselves." What doctors do need is a set of standards that make clear the role a physician should play in letting a patient go. How imminent should death be? How do physicians make sure a patient is mentally competent and really wants to die? What alternatives should be suggested? What sort of counseling is appropriate? The American Medical Association presently frowns upon doctors who participate in patient suicide...
...course, the judges who plumbed the depths of the Constitution to find the "right" to physician-assisted suicide--a right unfindable for 200 years--deny the possibility of such a nightmare scenario. Psychological pressure on the elderly and infirm to take drugs to hasten death? Why, "there should be none," breezily decrees the Second Circuit Court of Appeals...
King Canute had a better grip on reality. This nightmare scenario is not a hypothesis; it has been tested in Holland and proved a fact. Holland is the only jurisdiction in the Western world that heretofore permitted physician-assisted suicide. The practice is now widespread (perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 cases a year; the U.S. equivalent would be 40,000 to 60,000) and abused. Indeed, legalization has resulted in so much abuse--not just psychological pressure but a shocking number of cases of out-and-out involuntary euthanasia, inconvenient and defenseless patients simply put to death without their...
After all, why did we need this ruling in the first place? In New York State, where this case was brought, not a single physician has been penalized for aiding a suicide since 1919. For 77 years, one can assume, some doctors have been quietly helping patients die. Why then the need for a legal ruling to make that official, a ruling that erases a fundamental ethical line and opens medical practice to unconscionable abuse...