Political Forum - View Single Post - Supreme Court upholds Oregon assisted suicide law

JP5 · #9 (**permalink**) 01-17-2006, 07:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JavaBlack";p=&quot

What is so hard for you to figure out, JP5. Social liberals believe in the right to life as much as any of you cons. But what you believe in seems to be the requirement of life.
If I have the choice between a death with dignity and minimal suffering for myself and my family or a artificial life hooked to a machine for maximum family suffering, I will choose the former. What gives you or Scalia the right to tell me I have to be kept alive as long as possible regardless of the quality of that life. Especially since you guys would also put all the bills on my family and not allow any kind of funding to make my last days more bearable. Actually you'd have no issue with letting me die slowly if my family couldn't afford it.
So take your "right to life" hypocrisy and I think you know where it belongs.

First of all.....such decisions between doctors and families are made every day. You can already let it be known....through a legal document called "Physicians Directive" that you don't want to be kept alive artifically. When both my sister and my Mother were dying of cancer.....we had "Do Not Resusitate" orders for the doctors and nurses to follow. That meant, they would take no extraordinary measures to keep them alive. But they were kept out of pain....as they slowly died....by at first, self-administered doses of medicine and then by pain medication administered by nurses.

But actually giving someone a lethal dose of medicine ....making that decision to kill them......is a whole other thing. That goes against what medicine and doctoring is supposed to be about. That goes against their oath to "do no harm." When my Dad....who had suffered with Parkinson's disease for 20 years----ended up in a Nursing home......he once asked me to bring him his gun. Had I done something like that, I would have been brought up on charges. But.......he didn't really mean it, as he told me later that he didn't really mean it. And we would have missed out on lots of good conversations that we had......had I done so. So......terminally ill people can feel like dying one moment....and change their minds the next day. These should not be OUR decisions.