Freedom of sick people to die
Re “Putting end-of-life decisions in context,” column, Aug. 18
I am so angry.
I am angry that there are always “do-gooders” who want to use the court system to remove the freedom of individual choice, whether it be in the area of reproductive rights or the right to die.
They seem to think people could be coerced into choosing to end their lives. There are lots of safeguards against this.
Over the last 50 years, modern medicine has lengthened the lives of people who would have died a natural death much earlier. These measures can extend life but result in extreme misery.
I have written before about my 83-year-old husband who, suffering from glioblastoma, had to wait the two additional, horrific weeks after requesting the medication to end his life. “Just do it,” he would beg his family.
Thanks to the group Compassion and Choices and testimony to lawmakers from people like me, now he would only have had to wait two days.
Needless to say, he gulped that potion down with alacrity soon after it arrived and died quickly and peacefully.
So just go home, dogooders. Freedom and choice are the hallmarks of America.
Jane Roberts Redlands
Columnist Steve Lopez asks if the option of assisted suicide will be there for others as it was for the subject of his piece.
To plaintiffs in the referenced lawsuit and many in the disability, older adult and BIPOC communities, our question is: With assisted suicide on the books, will it be the only “healthcare” to which we have equal access?
It is a privileged, bourgeois set of experiences that frames this issue as choice rather than civil rights, as if everyone in California has equal access to excellent care.
When it’s easier for someone on Medi-Cal with lifethreatening disability to get suicide drugs than a mental health consult, and when University of California health systems won’t serve the majority of people of color due to low Medi-Cal reimbursement rates, the state has in effect created a death funnel for devalued groups.
To answer Lopez’s question: Taking one’s own life isn’t criminalized in California, and the right to refuse care is firmly established. This lawsuit doesn’t argue to change either of those things. We simply stand firm on healthcare equity and against a public policy at odds with it.
Matt Vallière
New York The writer is executive director of the Patients Rights Action Fund.
Both Nina Rota’s Aug. 13 op-ed article about the death of her wife (who was a dear friend of mine) and Lopez’s column more recently touched on the End of Life Option Act, allowing terminally ill patients to get life-ending medications within 48 hours.
I believe both articles portray the essence of this law:
People who are beloved, who love life, can choose a dignified death in defiance of the devastation of manmade medicines and machines that keep them alive, but just barely. Naomi Lerner Culver City