(Social issues) Peter Goodwin Is Dying:

[paularoid]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...-he-built.html

Peter Goodwin Is Dying: An Assisted-Suicide Doctor Invokes Law He Built
Mar 4, 2012 10:00 AM EST

Peter Goodwin helped establish the state’s Death With Dignity Act. Now the physician is about to use it to help end his own life.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...-he-built.html

[Ginny]

An interesting article, Paul... I agree with Peter Goodwin's religious relative... I'm religious also. Assisted suicide is wrong, in my eyes. For that matter, any form of suicide is wrong.



But for Goodwin, this is simply the natural course of things.“Like all severely controversial issues, there is no easy answer,” he says. “There is no answer that will satisfy everybody.”
One of Goodwin’s relatives, he says, is a deeply religious woman.“She says to me, Peter, I feel what you’re doing is wrong, but I love you and I want to be with you when it happens.”

[Dee]

i think this sentence sums things up nicely:

“Like all severely controversial issues, there is no easy answer,” he says. “There is no answer that will satisfy everybody.”

As someone who has lived daily with a potentially devastating/lethal heath condition for the past twenty-three years, I would not rule out the possibility of suicide or assisted suicide for myself, if it were legally available. And I carry a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) notice with me at all times which is also on all of my medical files. However, I do not believe that anyone else has the right to decide either of these things for another person, except perhaps a doctor under extreme circumstances.

[paularoid]

I don't believe in any one sentient all powerful being. I'm a deeply religious person but not in any way in a traditional sense. I could issue forth reams of discussion on that matter but it's one that's better left to a different discussion that the one immediately at hand.

Like Dee,

I do not believe that anyone else has the right to decide either of these things for another person

I've got a bumper sticker on my car that proclaims

"I'M A LIBERAL! It's okay if you're not".

The same basic attitude applies for me here as well. The way -I- think and feel should not apply to anyone else. It's a deeply -personal- decision to be made only by the person directly affected or by a person designated beforehand -by- that person to do so.

I -do- feel that we should all be allowed to -make- that decision when the time comes for that decision to be made.

[DaveM]

To me that is a purely personal choice and is no one's business but that of the person making the choice. If a doctor was making the decision rather than the patient, I'd be deeply concerned. But that is not the case here.

Obviously, assisted suicide occurs already, though completely unofficially. And many people in the end stages of life are "helped on their way" by a hefty morphine drip, as the amount needed to control pain at that point is often a de facto overdose. To me that is purely a matter of dignity. My father was spending the last hours of his life semi-conscious and constantly coughing up blood while cancer ate what remained of him. My sister (registered nurse) spoke with hospice and asked if she could increase his morphine as he was obviously in serious discomfort. Permission was granted and that stopped the coughing and cleared his head enough that he was able to speak with us for a few more hours before the poison that had been filling his system all along finally pushed him into a coma. While he remained conscious, he said he was comfortable enough.

Some of you know I was never all that crazy about the man and most likely never will be. But I would not leave a dog to suffer in the condition he was in before they increased the morphine. It may or may not have hastened the moment when he finally stopped breathing, but without it he would have gone out convulsing, unable to communicate, and coughing up blood while in terrible pain. I hope, if that is how my day comes, that someone will afford me the same courtesy.