Essays

Choosing one’s exit

Thanksgiving is hardly the time to think of shaking off these mortal coils; it’s a time for celebrating family and friends over a copious meal punctuated by good conversation and memorable stories of the year past.

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Right to Try vs Right to Die

On May 30, 2018, President Trump whose newly-found pro-life bona fides can no longer be in doubt, signed the Right to Try Act of 2017, which amends Federal law to allow certain FDA-unapproved, still experimental drugs to be administered to terminally ill patients who have otherwise exhausted all approved treatment options.

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Setback in California

A Riverside County (California) Superior Court Judge, Daniel Ottolia, entered an order on Friday, May 25, in Ahn v Hestrin, holding as invalid California’s End of Life Option Act, signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown in June 2016.

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When Words Matter

A recent NPR radio summary of an angry protest in Belgium over a controversial euthanasia incident likely disturbed any number of unwitting US listeners. The broadcast explained that a Belgian doctor had just resigned in anger and disgust from the country’s euthanasia commission after a dementia patient who never specifically asked to die was euthanized at the family’s request.

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MAID is not the same as Suicide

Opponents of MAID are quick to mischaracterize the exercise as Physician Assisted Suicide. It serves their narrative that a terminal patient seeking release from suffering, lack of autonomy, utter helplessness and futility in the face of the medically proclaimed inevitable should be viewed in the same prism as a vigorous young individual in excellent health who succumbs to a moment’s despair over a temporary setback.

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