Doctors everywhere should emulate the vast majority of physicians in Oregon, Washington, and now Montana, who refuse to participate or be complicit in assisted suicide. A woman with cancer who wanted to kill herself in Montana has died of her disease. From the story:
A Missoula woman, unable to find a physician willing to prescribe drugs that would hasten her death, has died of ovarian cancer. Janet Murdock died Sunday at age 67. Her death was announced Tuesday by the Denver-based patients’ rights group Compassion & Choices. The group was a plaintiff in a lawsuit that led to a judge’s ruling that physician-assisted suicide is a right protected under the Montana Constitution.
The state is appealing District Judge Dorothy McCarter’s ruling to the Montana Supreme court. McCarter refused to issue a stay pending appeal, and Montana doctors can legally prescribe drugs to end the lives of terminally ill patients. But patients seeking assistance to die have complained they cannot find physicians willing to help them.
I am sorry Murdock died and I hope she received quality care and the good palliation available to people dying of cancer. But I am glad no physician sanctioned a poisonous overdose of drugs as a “medical treatment.”
June 17th, 2009 | 1:21 pm
And, as usual, check out the loaded language: C&C is a “patients’ rights group”!
June 17th, 2009 | 4:15 pm
Wow. I hope that you never have to deal with a disease as insidious as ovarian cancer. I feel for that poor woman, and would gladly have given her whatever she wanted to end the awful pain, swelling, and sickness that occur with ovarian cancer. What business is it of yours anyway? Shouldn’t she have been able to decide her own fate?
We treat our ailing pets so much better than we do our humans. We offer them the dignity of euthanization – why can’t a human ask for that as well?
I really hope that you never have this disease. Now you certainly don’t know the horror of it.
June 17th, 2009 | 8:53 pm
Gayle: Wow, back. I have been a hospice volunteer and I am very well aware of the difficulties it can cause. My dad died of colon cancer. My uncle of Alzheimer’s. I understand serious illness up close and personal.
Assisted suicide isn’t the answer. What is needed is hands-on care.
Moreover, according to the Oregon Dept. of Health and Human Services, nobody has assisted suicide there because of symptoms that cannot be relieved. It is because of fear of the future, of being a burden, of losing dignity, etc. Indeed, doctors who lethally prescribe–most affiliated with Compassion and Choices–often do so even when the patient is not experiencing terrible symptoms.
We euthanize pets when they get incontinent, we euthanaize them if we don’t want to pay the money needed to keep them going, we euthanize them if they are abandoned, we euthanize them if they bite people, etc. You may wish to reduce medicine to veterinary standards, but I don’t.
June 18th, 2009 | 3:59 am
Wesley-exactly. Some people don’t seem willing to understand that people who oppose assisted suicide want to improve care for the sick and disabled, not bludgeon it via the legalization of euthanasia. Such people like to paint their opponents as being heartless and cruel, and don’t want to face the reality of what they’re really supporting.
June 18th, 2009 | 3:59 am
Moreover, the suffering and death of a human being is everybody’s business, especially when that person is being threatened.
June 18th, 2009 | 9:35 am
It gets old SafePres, as in, “If you had anyone close to you with a serious condition, you’d support assisted suicide.” This is sometimes said by people who admit their loved ones never asked for it. So, who wanted the assisted suicide? There is more than a a little of “we want him out of our misery,” in this agenda.
June 18th, 2009 | 4:44 pm
[...] recently wrote about the death of Jayne Murdock in Montana, who wanted assisted suicide but found no doctor willing to lethally prescribe. I was and am pleased with that, because prescribing drugs to intentionally be used in an [...]
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