Here we go again. Having failed to convince Massachusetts voters to legalize assisted suicide in 2012, and having repeatedly failed to get such legislation passed, the Hemlock Society Compassion and Choices is bringing a lawsuit to declare that assisted suicide is a right because it isn’t suicide. From the WCBV story:
Two Cape Cod doctors are asking a Massachusetts court to rule that it’s not a criminal act for physicians to prescribe lethal doses of medication to mentally competent patients with terminal illnesses.
A lawsuit was filed Monday in Suffolk Superior Court by Dr. Roger Kligler, who has terminal cancer, and Dr. Alan Steinbach, with the help of Compassion & Choices, a Denver-based nonprofit that works on end-of-life choices. It also asks the court for an injunction to prevent criminal prosecution of what it calls “medical aid in dying,” which the group says is not the same as assisted suicide.
The group says in medical aid in dying, the patient controls the process from beginning to end. In assisted suicide and euthanasia, someone else’s actions and choices cause death.
What drivel. Euthanasia, where legal, is usually asked for by the person killed. Ditto assisted suicide.
Besides, if being in “control of the process”–a false premise as the whole point is to have an MD validate the hastened death–somehow makes self-killing not suicide but something else, what does terminal illness have to do with it? I mean, what constitutional rights are so narrowly limited to a minority of people?
This same gambit has failed before in Connecticut and New Mexico.
But think about the attempted societal corruption! Typical of these zealots who want to expand the culture of death by whatever means necessary, including by euthanizing the integrity and meaning of language.