For several months, some of True Dignity’s friends have been eager to take concrete action to fight assisted suicide in Vermont. Now is the appropriate time to take action.
Vermont’s senators are under enormous pressure to pass the Senate version of the assisted suicide bill, S.0103.
Please contact your senator and tell him/her that the people of Vermont do not want assisted suicide. If you know your senator opposes assisted suicide, express your thanks and support. You can find Senate contact information at hthttp://www.leg.state.vt.us/lms/legdir/districts.asp?Body=S.
Posted below is an action alert email that Vermont Alliance for Ethical Health Care (VAEH) sent to its members today. Here are a few additional talking points to the excellent ones suggested by VAEH:
• Legal assisted suicide is a recipe for the abuse of the elderly and the disabled. Because the proposed VT legislation requires no witnesses at the time the patient takes the lethal dose of barbiturates, it provides no protection at all against someone’s forcing him or her to take it.http://www.choiceillusion.org/p/vermont-bar-journal-winter-2011.html
• Legal assisted suicide gives state sanction to suicide as the solution to certain problems. How can we sanction some suicides and not expect the overall rate of suicide in Vermont to go up, as it has in Oregon? http://www.oregon.gov/DHS/news/2010news/2010-0909a.pdf?ga=t
• Legal assisted suicide leads to pressure to die. In two separate cases from Oregon, the state’s Medicaid program declined coverage of life-prolonging treatment, but instead offered to cover the cost of assisted suicide. This is pressure, the antithesis of choice. http://www.pccef.org/articles/art67.htm
• Legal assisted suicide is seen as a threat by people with disabilities. Many people with disabilities rely on the care of others for survival and constantly have to fight societal assumptions that their lives are not worth living. http://notdeadyetnewscommentary.blogspot.com/2011/12/massachusetts-john-kelly-of-second.html