Patient Choice at End of Life
The following is an article that I wrote a couple weeks ago. I should have sent it to iBrattleboro immediately but didn’t. My apologies for that. But here it is.
This week (the week of Feb 16) the Senate passed what is referred to s.77. Make no mistake – what we passed was not S.77. S.77 was a well thought out bill modeled after the Oregon law that allows a competent adult with a terminal illness the ability to have control at the end of his life. Many objected because they felt that no one should take his own life and this was condoning suicide. Some objected because they felt there were not enough safeguards for the disability community, that it discriminated against those who had lost the ability to self-administer the drug, and that it did not put enough emphasis on palliative care.