Annapolis, Md., Mar 8, 2019 / 02:45 pm (CNA).- The lower house of the Maryland legislature passed a bill Thursday to legalize assisted suicide, in the face of critics’ concerns about a lack of safeguards and economic discrimination.
The House of Delegates approved the End-of-Life Options Act by a 74-66 vote March 7.
Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore has said the bill would “further undermine the dignity of human life.”
“Physician-assisted suicide is not a partisan issue, and those who are concerned about the health disparity and economic discrimination issues raised by the bill stand in strong opposition to its passage,” said Jennifer Briemann, executive director of the Maryland Catholic Conference.
“Among those in opposition were a majority of the members of the Legislative Black Caucus and many members of Democratic House leadership, and we applaud their courage to stand up to the out-of-state interests pushing this predatory agenda.”
“We call on the members of the Maryland Senate and Governor Hogan to act swiftly to decry the action of their colleagues in the House and stop this dangerously flawed bill from advancing.”
Maryland Against Physician Assisted Suicide, a coalition opposed to the bill, expressed hope that the Senate would recognize “that the legislation simply does not address any of the dangers that physician assisted suicide poses to Maryland.”
“As coalition members have said all along, there are no meaningful safeguards in this legislation to protect against the coercion and abuse of seniors, the disabled, and other vulnerable populations. There is no way to address the fact that patients in states where this practice is legal are requesting the lethal drugs because they feel like burdens on their families, not because they are in pain … Alongside these dangers, this practice distorts medical ethics and devalues existing end-of-life care.”
This is the fourth attempt in five years to legalize assisted suicide in the state. The move is being supported by the Compassion and Choices, an Oregon-based group that advocates for assisted suicide, and the bill is based on Oregon’s assisted suicide law.
Similar bills were introduced in 2015, 2016, and 2017, but were withdrawn before they could be voted down.
If passed, the bill would permit doctors to prescribe lethal medications to adult patients with a terminal illness and six months left to live. The bill would overturn a 1999 Maryland law that banned assisted suicide, and it would protect from prosecution doctors who prescribe the drugs. It would require that a patient make two oral and one written request to a physician, waiting two to 15 days between requests.
Physicians who decline to provide the lethal medication would be required to refer the patient to another doctor.
The bills have also been opposed by groups such as the Maryland Psychiatric Society and Baltimore City Medical Society.
The MCC found that, under the bill, no assessment screens for depression nor is there a supervisor to ensure a patient is not pressured into the process. The bill also does not require a medical professional to be present during the suicide, or a contingency if the attempt is unsuccessful.
Delegate Nic Kipke noted that “if people cannot afford treatments they need for their care, and if people are making choices based on economic factors that is not consistent with choice or safety from coercion,” WAMU reported.
The Senate version of the bill has at least 19 sponsors in the 47-member body.
Governor Larry Hogan, a Catholic and a Republican, has not indicated whether he would sign the bill. The Baltimore Sun reported that Hogan has said the bill is “one that I really wrestle with from a personal basis.”
Assisted suicide is legal by law in the District of Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, Vermont, Hawaii, and Colorado; and in Montana through a state supreme court ruling.
According to MAPAS, Dr. Joseph Marine, an associate professor of medicine at John Hopkins, said this kind of end-of-life care is dangerous to Maryland, noting other states have already witnessed its ugly effects.
“We are already seeing reports of insurance companies in some states declining to cover the cost of life-extending treatments, and instead paying for these drug overdoses that end a patient’s life.”
During debate on the bill, Delegate Joseline Peña-Melnyk said that “we have 40 years of documented evidence that this is not a problem and there has never been abuse.”
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The Betty White stamps are out too.
Life is good.
Buckley was a classic conservative, not a right wing populist. They are not the same thing.
A classic conservative believes in the Constitution, the separation of powers. Right wing populists seem to want an all powerful executive, unrestrained by the Constitution.
Yes, Buckley wanted a smaller Federal Government, but he also wanted a Federal Government that operates within the law.
Both definitions serve only to create dismissive means of understanding by the enemies of conservatism. The driving factors of anyone gravitating towards an identification as a conservative have always been culturally based and intuitively based on religion. Despite how many bad historians falsify history by associating leftist tyrannies with the political right, conservatives, not progressive secularists, value, innate truth, natural law, and rights as divine endowments rather than political inventions.
Hitler and Mussolini were”Leftists?” I don’t think so. They were Fascists. Ditto Franco, Peron, etc.
Fascists are leftists. Don’t be swayed by the preposterous projections of leftist history.
So, there is no Extreme Right? I don’t agree that Fascists are Leftists. Communists are indeed extreme Left, but Fascists are extreme Right.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is a Leftist, not a classic Liberal. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not a true Conservative, but a Right Winger. I wish the media would get this right.
It really matters little to those suffering under a totalitarian regime what the regime leadership identifies as. Totalitarian is as totalitarian does.
Who are those who deny objective morality. Those who actually deny it, such as all leftists including all communists and fascists, or those who affirm objective morality, such as those who value conserving immutable truths, such as all right wing anti-fascists and anti-communists. Reconsider your knowledge of history in place of the cliched assumptions of airheaded academics, journalists, and historians.
William: Your definitions are the accepted conventions, so they can’t be faulted for their intent.
Nonetheless, as the post war Austrian historian Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and others pointed out, the very concept of an ideological political spectrum is an invention of religion hating revolutionaries who always stood to salvage respectability by creating the fiction of moral equivalency between those competing socialist factions who identify themselves differently whether they see nationalized tyrannies or internationalist tyrannies as primarily the means to social utopia, which they assume, everyone desires.
Liberals believing they have been fair to conservatives place their ideas at some place on this fictional spectrum but are not fair enough to know that conservative arguments revolve around denying this spectrum. Conservatives might grudgingly concede the language of the revolutionaries at times, for purposes of rebuke, while making the religious argument that only a moral people can create honor and justice in society, and there can never be anything “revolutionary” in the human condition. Conservatives don’t see government as their savior, nor do they even view conservatism as an “ideology” since that term assumes truth is manmade rather than divinely endowed. Buckley’s famous quip for original sin and against the myth of progress in the human condition was his plea to stand atop history and yell, “Stop!”
Buckley on a stamp! A great move, although on his “Firing Line” he immediately would have debated the reasons behind today’s inflated price of stamps. His Stamp Act, for sure.
And, this commemoration is much to be preferred over placing Obama on Mount Rushmore as some fantasized earlier.