For-profit health care can be a barrier to providing quality end-of-life care

Do not be misled by insidiously deceptive arguments about how physician assisted suicide is somehow compassionate. 

I urge blog readers to consider the points made in the rebuttal of a New York Times opinion writer who obviously has a point of view about death that is inconsistent with hospice care.

A New York Times opinion discussion creates the false assumption that for some "mercy is death", meaning those who cannot endure living with a terminal illness should have the autonomy to choose how they want to die. Somehow, this false narrative creates the impression that causing a person to die can be an act of compassion. But, what the narrative misses is that an alternative to physician assisted suicide are the actual compassionate supports provided by hospice and palliative care. Advocates for physician assisted suicide completely omit this alternative for the purpose of advancing their technique of supplying a persona who chooses to die with a toxic poisonous cocktail that they must ingest according to package directions, so they are sure to end their lives quickly. This is not a dignified way to die. Moreover, very few people who are truly at the end of their lives caused by a life ending disease are capable of ingesting so much liquid poison. The following response was published in The New York Times letters to the editor as a rebuttal to the argument made by one wrong minded advocate for supporting physician assisted suicide. 

To the Editor of The New York Times:

The question in a New York Times opinion was about whether choosing death in Canada is too easy, presupposes that everyone has choices. This is not so in the U.S. for-profit health system. 

Personal autonomy is paramount for most people, but true autonomy in end-of-life decision-making would mean that folks have equal access to care.

Canadian systems are stretched to a breaking point- is suicide coerced? Our broken U.S., profit-driven system causes health care disparities to remain rampant, so this situation is no better than in Canada.

When veterans in Canada are offered euthanasia for PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), when people with disabilities are approved for hastened death because of a lack of affordable, accessible housing, and when young people with anorexia at their wits’ end are provided a prescription by physicians to die by suicide, we have to ask ourselves if this is really even a choice.

When care is denied or even merely delayed by budget-strapped public programs or greedy U.S. for-profit insurers, while assisted suicide is available, it sounds a lot less like choice and more like coercion and a quiet form of eugenics.

Matt Vallière, New York
The writer is an emergency medical worker and the executive director of the Patients’ Rights Action Fund, which is opposed to physician assisted suicide.

Definition of hospice:  A special healthcare option for patients and families who are faced with a terminal illness. A multi-disciplinary team of physicians, nurses, hospice aides, social workers, bereavement counselors and volunteers work together to address the physical, social, emotional and spiritual needs of each patient and family.

Physician Assisted Suicide is rooted in evil eugenics!

Echo opinion published by the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition:

"Let's be clear. Removing the requirement of consent at the time of death, extending euthanasia to people with dementia, and in the Netherlands, the approval of the Groningen Protocol, which permits killing of babies with disabilities, are all eugenic idiolectal positions," Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.

It is hard to understand how anybody can support physician assisted suicide when palliative care and hospice care is proven to be effective in supporting the compassionate care for the chronically ill and those who are dealing with terminal illness. 

In fact, the eugenics alliance with hemlock groups is not reported by the media because people who support physician assisted suicide are blinded by wrong-minded emotional responses to this terrible alternative to the effectiveness of palliative care and hospice.

In response to attacks against the Care Not Killing Alliance in the UK, Jamie Gillies, in spiked-online focuses on the eugenics roots of the assisted dying movement. 

Gillies writes about Killick Millard who founded the leading assisted dying group in the UK. Gillies states:

Scotland’s media class seems quite happy to spare prominent groups on the other side of the assisted-suicide debate from scrutiny. The Record, for instance, has failed to mention that Dignity in Dying, the group leading the charge for assisted suicide in the UK, was founded and funded by eugenicist politician Killick Millard.

Millard is said to have been ‘informed by a coherent philosophy… underpinned by eugenic ideas about the importance of maintaining the calibre of the racial stock’. He was what, in modern terms, we might call ‘ableist’, arguing in 1931 that the ‘feeble-minded and mentally deficient’ – those with mental-health problems – ‘should be sterilised’.

And he was also anti-working class. In 1911, in an essay on poverty, Millard celebrated the fact that ‘slum dwellers’ had a high rate of infant mortality, stating that ‘this consideration goes a long way towards allaying the fear that the falling birth-rate of the superior classes, and the comparatively high birth-rate of the very lowest class, threatens the quality of the race’.

It must be noted that in March 2020, a UN disability rights expert stated that she is concerned about euthanasia, assisted suicide and the new eugenics.

The American media also ignore the fact that the leading assisted suicide lobby group in the US, was also founded by hard core eugenics proponents.

Historian, Ian Dowbiggin, in his ground breaking book: A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America. proves beyond a doubt that the founders of the euthanasia lobby were wedded to the eugenics movement. His book was so clear that Compassion and Choices appears to have destroyed its historical archives.

In November 2015 Dowbiggin wrote about his concern that the historical records of the euthanasia lobby were destroyed. He wrote:

One thing is clear: if the euthanasia movement’s records have indeed been destroyed, a lot of history has vanished, Orwell-like, down a cavernous memory hole. And with it, information the right-to-die movement doesn’t want you to know.

I should know, because I saw these records and I know what was in them. I wrote up my findings in my 2003 book on the history of the movement, published by Oxford University Press.

The story of my involvement in these valuable records begins about fifteen years ago when I was given permission to explore the archives of what used to be called Partnerships for Caring, Inc. 

PFC was a successor organization to the defunct Euthanasia Society of America (ESA). The ESA records, housed in a law firm in Baltimore, consisted of 15 large cardboard boxes holding correspondence, financial records, press releases, published materials and minutes of meetings, much of it uncatalogued.

There were literally thousands of items in these boxes documenting the entire 20th c. history of the U.S. and non-American activists who advocated the legalization of various forms of euthanasia. The ESA archive contained materials relating to the careers of noteworthy social activists such as Derek Humphry, the founder of the Hemlock Society (now called Compassion and Choices), Joseph Fletcher, the founder of “situation ethics,” Alan Guttmacher (after whom the population-control Guttmacher Institute in New York City is named), and the birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger who, unbeknownst to all her biographers, was also a vocal proponent of legalized euthanasia.

Not only did these activists urge governments to permit voluntary mercy-killing and physician-assisted suicide, many also supported the involuntary mercy-killing of handicapped people. For example, despite his knowledge of widespread Nazi murder of people with disabilities, in 1943 the ESA’s president thought it was a good idea to legalize euthanasia in time for returning veterans who suffered from mental and physical wounds.

Dowbiggin then explains how he learned that the euthanasia lobby destroyed their history. Dowbiggin states:

But the story did not end there. About five years after the book’s publication, I was contacted by a US graduate student researching the history of euthanasia. She told me that in trying to track down the ESA records she had been informed that the collection had been intentionally destroyed.

Just this year another US graduate student got in touch with me, also trying to locate the ESA archives. She too has been told the records no longer exist, although she is still investigating.

Of course, it might be that the ESA records are sitting somewhere safe and sound. Yet why do groups like Compassion and Choices ignore my own requests for information? Why, when a published scholar in the history of medicine enquires about the whereabouts of this important archive, is there a resounding silence?

The euthanasia lobby, world-wide, was intertwined with the eugenics movement and its leadership continues to be suspicious in its ideology today.

Let's be clear. Removing the requirement of consent at the time of death, extending euthanasia to people with dementia, and in the Netherlands, the approval of the Groningen Protocol, which permits killing of babies with disabilities, are all eugenic idiolectal position

Obituary from Military Times - Dabney Montgomery Tuskegee Airman

At 93, Dabney Mongomery died in a hospice, of natural causes, in New York City.

Tuskegee Airman Who Marched with MLK in Selma Dies at 93, years old.

Obituary notice:

NEW YORK -- Dabney Montgomery, who served with the all-black Tuskegee Airmen in World War II and marched with civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., has died. He was 93.

Dabney Montgomery attending a baseball game in New York on June 5, 2013 (AP- Kathy Willens)

His wife, Amelia Montgomery, said he died of natural causes Saturday morning at a Manhattan hospice care facility. He had lived in Harlem until he entered the facility Aug. 25.

Montgomery was born in in Selma, Alabama, in 1923 and was inducted into the armed forces in 1943. He served as a ground crewman with the Tuskegee Airmen in southern Italy during the war.

He attended Livingstone College in North Carolina on the GI bill and later moved to New York to find work.

Montgomery was active in the civil rights movement, serving as a bodyguard to King during the famous 1965 Selma to Montgomery march.

Amelia Montgomery said the heels of the shoes and the tie her husband wore on the Selma march will be part of the permanent collection at the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. , when it opens on Sept. 24.

Montgomery was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007 after President George W. Bush signed a law awarding the distinction to all original Tuskegee Airmen.

He worked for the New York City Housing Authority and as a volunteer outreach worker for a nonprofit that assists the elderly.

Montgomery remained active until his final weeks, frequently visiting schools to talk to children about his experiences growing up in Alabama, serving in the war and marching for civil rights.

"He just loved motivating young people to be somebody," Amelia Montgomery said. "That was his joy."

Medical Association public hearing about Physician Assisted Suicide

"...allowing physicians to participate in what amounts to assisted suicide may cause more harm than good. The provisions of the bill are fundamentally incompatible with the physician's role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control and would pose serious societal risks."

This public hearing testimony provided by the Maine Medical Association explains a point of view in opposition to physician assisted suicide. Although this end of life issue is cloaked by emotion, the inclusion of others who will be asked to participate in this practice, is seldom considered.

Testimony of Gordon Smith Esq.

Testimony of the Maine Medical Association in Opposition to l..D. 1270, An Act Regarding Patient-directed Care at the End of Life to The Joint Standing Committee on Health and Human Services Cross Office Building, Room 209 May 15, 2015, 9:30 am 

Senator Brakey, Representative Gattine and members of the Committee, I am Gordon Smith, of East Winthrop, testifying today on behalf of the Maine Medical Association which l serve as Executive Vice President. 

The Association represents the interests of over 3700 Maine physicians, medical students and residents. The Maine Medical Association appreciates the good intentions of Senator Katz and the bill's cosponsors in presenting L.D. 1270 which would authorize a physician to prescribe a fatal dose of medication to a terminally ill patient under speci cally described circumstances and subject to several regulatory protections. If enacted, Maine would become one of a handful of states, including Vermont, Oregon, Washington and Montana, which allow such a practice. 

Maine voters rejected similar legislation in a ballot referendum in the year 2000. Given that other states have actual experience now since that time, it certainly is reasonable for the Legislature or the voters to take another look at this. And it is understandable that some patients in extreme duress such as those suffering from a terminal, painful debilitating illness may decide that death is preferable to life. 

However, allowing physicians to participate in what amounts to assisted suicide may cause more harm than good. 

The provisions of the bill are fundamentally incompatible with the physician's role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control and would pose serious societal risks. The Code of Ethics of the American Medical Association, enforceable against Maine physicians as standards of practice by the medical licensing boards, in , Section 2.211 (attached to my testimony) prohibits a physician from taking the action called for in L.D. 1270. 

Passage of the proposal would put physicians in a conflicting position of honoring legal patient wishes or upholding their professional ethical code. 

Rather than working with patients to end their lives, physicians should aggressively respond to patient needs at the end of life. Among the options available are hospice care, palliative care, specialty consultations, pastoral support, family counseling, conscious sedation, and other modalities. 

Patients near the end of life must continue to receive emotional support, comfort care, adequate pain control, respect for patient autonomy and good communication. You will hear from many opponents of some of the risks and dangers associated with this type of legislation. One significant one is that patients who may be without insurance coverage may chose suicide out of financial concerns...specifically not wishing to be a burden on their families. Such a decision should not have to be made in a just society with the resources that are available in our state and nation. A second risk is that despite the attempt in the bill to provide protections, the lives of our vulnerable elderly will be devaIued...the right to die may for them become the duty to die. And finally, physicians do not wish to play God. No one knows when a person's time on this earth is up, or when our "expiration" date arrives, as my late father Ezra used to say shortly before his good death at the VA Hospice last November at the age of 91. What a loss it would have been to our learned society if Stephen Hawking had taken advantage of this type of law had it been available in England when he was found to be terminally ill with ALS while still in college. He lives on today in his early 70's enjoying his children, grandchildren and still engaged in his research and writing. 

Thank you for the opportunity to testify and I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.