Search Results for: assisted suicide

DREDF, along with numerous other nationally prominent disability organizations, opposes the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia. Legalization is a serious mistake for many reasons that are not always immediately apparent. Supporters often focus solely on issues of choice and self-determination, but actually, legalization would restrict choice and self-determination. It is crucial to look deeper. For example, assisted suicide would be a deadly mix with our broken, profit-driven health [...] ...

Table of Contents Introduction Few Helped, Many Harmed: Disability Prejudice and the Damage to Society Legal Alternatives Avoid A Great Harm Fear, Bias, and Prejudice against Disability A Deadly Mix: Managed Health Care and Assisted Suicide An Ailing System Made Worse Deteriorating Health Care in Oregon The Broad Indirect Impacts on Health Care The Failure of Safeguards and the Case of Oregon The Myth of Free Choice and Self-Determination The Fundamental Loophole of Terminal Illness Prognosis Safeguards in Name Only Doctor Shopping: All Roads Lead to Rome Alternatives: Presented But Not Provided Good Faith: A Safeguard for Doctors, Not Patients The Danger to People with Depression and Psychiatric Disabilities Depression and the Wish to Die Ignoring What Lies Beneath: The Abandonment of the Patient One Visit, Rarely: The Impact on the Individual Minimal Data and Fatally Flawed Oversight The Questionable...

Marilyn Golden Policy Analyst Prologue In 1999, faced with a bill in the California legislature to legalize assisted suicide, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) joined ten other nationally prominent disability organizations in adopting a position against the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia.[1] The 1999 California bill went down to defeat, due in part to an opposition coalition spanning the political spectrum from left to right. That coalition represented disability rights [...] ...

“We are not given the resources to investigate [assisted-suicide cases] and not only do we not have the resources to do it, but we do not have any legal authority to insert ourselves.” [1] — Dr. Katrina Hedberg, Oregon Department of Human Services Under Oregon and Washington State’s lax oversight, these are some of the documented abuses and complications that have come to light. This list includes abuses and medical complications, as well as other incidents [...] ...

Diane Coleman, J.D. Introduction On March 24, 1997, the National Council on Disability issued “Assisted Suicide: A Disability Perspective,” becoming one of the first prominent national disability organizations to address the controversial topic. At the time the Position Paper was issued, the U.S. Supreme Court was preparing to rule on appeals from the Second and Ninth Circuit Courts, each of which had declared assisted suicide a constitutional right. After a thorough review of the forms of discrimination [...] ...

January 25, 2015 The Oregon law is based on the faulty assumption that it is possible to make a clear distinction between those who are terminally ill with six months to live, and everyone else. Everyone else is supposedly protected and not eligible for doctor-prescribed suicide....

1. Assisted suicide is a deadly mix with our broken, profit-driven health care system Financial pressures already play far too great a role in many, if not most, health care decisions. Direct coercion is not even necessary. If insurers deny, or even merely delay, approval of expensive, life-giving treatments that patients need, patients will, in effect, be steered toward assisted suicide, if it is legal. For example, patients Barbara Wagner and Randy Stroup, Oregonians with cancer, were both informed by the Oregon Health Plan that the Plan won’t pay for their chemotherapy, [...] ...