The increasingly heinous redefinition of assisted suicide as a normative healthcare option has resulted in the discouraging of medical treatment for treatable illnesses, according to a new report.
The National Council on Disability has found that the expanding of choice-based assisted suicide laws actually tends to “remove choices” from the patient regarding the prospective treatment plans.
The report noted that, in uber-liberal Oregon, assisted suicide options have become available to those with “disabilities that, when properly treated, do not result in death, including arthritis, diabetes, and kidney failure.”
Striking out at the failure of “safeguards,” NCD found that insurers are consistently denying “expensive, life-sustaining medical treatment,” while offering “to subsidize lethal drugs, potentially leading patients to hasten their own deaths.”
Some of the details of the report can be read below:
“Assisted suicide laws contain provisions intended to safeguard patients from problems or abuse. However, research for this report showed that these provisions are ineffective, and often fail to protect patients in a variety of ways, including:
– Insurers have denied expensive, life-sustaining medical treatment but offered to subsidize lethal drugs, potentially leading patients toward hastening their own deaths.
– Misdiagnoses of terminal disease can also cause frightened patients to hasten their deaths.
– People with the disability of depression are subject to harm where assisted suicide is legal.
– Demoralization in people with disabilities is often based on internalized oppression, such as being conditioned to regard help as undignified and burdensome, or to regard disability as an inherent impediment to quality of life. Demoralization can also result from the lack of options that people depend on. These problems can lead patients toward hastening their deaths— and doctors who conflate disability with terminal illness or poor quality of life are ready to help them. Moreover, most health professionals lack training and experience in working with people with disabilities, so they don’t know how to recognize and intervene in this type of demoralization.
– Financial and emotional pressures can distort patient choice.
– Assisted suicide laws apply the lowest culpability standard possible to doctors, medical staff, and all other involved parties, that of a good- faith belief that the law is being followed, which creates the potential for abuse.”
This horrifying discovery shocked NCD’s chairman, Neil Romano, to the core. “Assisted suicide laws are premised on the notion of additional choice for people at the end of their lives, however in practice, they often remove choices when the low-cost option is ending one’s life versus providing treatments to lengthen it or services and supports to improve it,” he explained, according to the Christian Institute.
The report highlights the despicable reality that relaxed euthanasia laws are allowing to becoming the norm, namely that the sick and infirm are regarded “as undignified and burdensome,” and would be better off dead than adequately cared for.
Currently, Assisted Suicide is legal in Washington D.C., California, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, Maine (beginning January 1, 2020), New Jersey, Hawaii, and Washington.
Elsewhere in Europe, it’s presence has become commonplace. As Faithwire previously reported, in Belgium, Euthanasia is rapidly becoming the top “medical solution” for non-terminal patients.
In August, a Dutch doctor came under investigation for assisting in the euthanasia of a patient who suffered from dementia, as well as ordering her restraint when she resisted the lethal injection. The medic was acquitted at The Hague last month.