Essays

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.

A recent WaPo article by the daughter of a suicide highlights inadvertently the vital differences between suicide and Medical Aid in Dying.

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.

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.

More than 80 interested guests joined us at our first conference at Charlotte’s UNC-C Center City on May 9, 2018, entitled “Expanding Medical Aid in Dying in North Carolina: Choices and Challenges”.

Yesterday, with the signature of Governor David Ice on the Our Care, Our Choice Act, the Aloha State became the 8th US jurisdiction to authorize Medical Aid in Dying.

At the annual Democratic Party convention of the Orange County Democrats, a resolution calling for enactment of MAID in North Carolina introduced by DRNC Executive Director Edmund Tiryakian, who is also a precinct chairman, was unanimously approved.

DRNC is sponsoring an important conference on the future of MAID in NC. Our keynote speakers are Barbara Mancini, whose harrowing tale of being arrested in PA while trying to help her bedridden dying father shocked audiences when she was interviewed on 60 Minutes, and Atty Kathryn Tucker, the nation’s premier litigator of MAID cases.

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.

On January 31, 2018 to the surprise and delight of many, an Alaska House Health Committee approved 5-2 a measure to enact MAID in Alaska, HB 54.

One of the more confounding reasons cited by opponents of MAID is the notion, that the timeline called for under the statutory enactments that two doctors believe the applicant is likely to pass within six months due to a terminal condition, is at best an unreliable, if not impossible guesstimate.

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.