Barbara Lyons of the Patient Rights Action Fund (609-759-0322, Ext 501) reports this afternoon that not all the news from the American Medical Association’s House of Delegates meeting was as bad as it seemed.
True Dignity reported on June 11, 2018 that the delegates had not accepted the recommendation of the AMA’s ethics board that it refuse to call assisted suicide by the bland, ambiguous, and less morally appalling term “aid in dying” and that it continue its longstanding opposition to AS. The delegates asked the ethics board to spend another year studying the topic and prepare another report for consideration and a vote at the 2019 meeting.
Afterwards, however, they twice voted down a proposal to strike from the AMA’s current official position statement on assisted suicide the sentence opposing its legalization on the grounds that “these practices are fundamentally inconsistent with the physician’s role as healer.”
Thus the AMA’s longtime opposition to AS continues, thanks to a deliberate decision of the delegates. This decision, Lyons writes, “gives us some hope for future votes.”