Euthanasia in Washington State Connected to Poverty and Bigotry against Disabled
 
        True Compassion Advocates in the state of Washington, where voters recently legalized assisted suicide, send disturbing news. With states implementing draconian budget cuts on health care for the poor and reducing or eliminating services for disability, the “choice” of death becomes an illusion. Vulnerable people struggling with aging, illness, and disability are receiving the message that good care choices are few or nonexistent, but state-sponsored assisted suicide is cheap and readily available.
        In their 2010 report, the state’s Department of Health reported 87 people received lethal doses and 71 individuals died – 51 after ingesting the lethal dose and 15 from other causes. They don’t know if the remaining died of assisted suicide or not, and have no idea about the status for the 15 remaining people as to whether they are alive or dead. There seems to be some problem with the accuracy and timeliness of the reporting. TCA’s president Eileen Geller noted, “The published data from the 2010 report is so limited and unreliable that even some who agree with the policy have qualms regarding the DOH’s inability to determine whether the law operates with the full safety and voluntariness its proponents promised. . .  [the law] has become a recipe for elder abuse and a vehicle for financial coercion.”
        As we note from abortion clinics, capital cases in the courts, and war, shoddiness is often a side-effect of killing. The emotional numbing that must go with killing can easily slip into the record-keeping.  
 

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Delving Deeper – from a Law Professor
 
"The Priority of Respect: How Our Common Humanity Can Ground Our Individual Dignity", International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 44, p. 165 (2004). 
 
         CL Board member Richard Stith (pictured at the 2011 March for Life) offers an essay about a missing foundation for opposition to killing and speaks to abortion, the death penalty, and euthanasia in particular. He explains: “It begins by noting that the priority of persons, the unbridgeable political gap between persons and mere things, corresponds to a special sort of moral and legal treatment for persons, namely, as irreplaceable individuals. Normative language that conflates the category of person with fungible kinds of being can thus appear to justify destroying and replacing human beings, just as we do with things. Lethal consequences may result, for example, from a common but improper extension of the word “value” from things to persons (as when we say "Everyone is valuable." or "Everybody's life has value."). The attitude and act called “respect” brings forth much more adequately than “value” the distinctively individual priority of persons, allowing our common humanity to be a reason for each person’s separate significance. Unless we focus on the respect-worthiness of human life rather than on its value, we will not be able to argue coherently against those who think its destruction permissible.”

 
Quotation of the Week
Diane Gianelli
"Abortion Providers Share Inner Conflicts," American Medical News, July 12, 1993
 
Note: This is another example of the human mind’s reaction to doing violence, found across all the different kinds of violence. Click here for more quotations which document how abortion staff people understand that they’re killing. 

“A New Mexico physician said he was sometimes surprised by the anger a late-term abortion can arouse in him. On the one hand, the physician said, he is angry at the woman. ‘But paradoxically,’ he added, ‘I have angry feelings at myself for feeling good about grasping the calvaria, for feeling good about doing a technically good procedure which destroys a fetus, kills a baby.’”