But First, Do No Harm.

The Supreme Court took up the case of assisted suicide last week in Gonzales v. Oregon. Read this article and tell me if you are as horrified as I am that we are even considering this. I find it funny in a creepy way how the law states the patient must ask a Doctor to kill him THREE times, like some macrabre Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz trying to get home to Kansas.

Asking Doctors to kill terminally ill patients is so wrong on so many levels. Not only going against what Doctors are there to do, but opening the door to so many ways to push elderly bothersome relatives out the door, so to speak.

"Now remember Grandma, ask him THREE times, ok? Today, tomorrow, and the next day. This hospitalization is killing us here. Think of your family."

Does anyone reading this think that wouldn't happen? Of course it would. Especially if there is ANY money involved. Just like in all end of life issues (including abortion) it tears apart the natural bond between those that love each other.

I have seen wonderful hospice situations. I know wonderful doesn't sound like the right word. But when a loved one is being looked after and cared for by someone who loves them, and then the time comes when they are about to die, there is something soothing there that gives the person who is left behind some comfort in the knowledge that they gave love in the end. That that was their last and most precious gift to that person. I am convinced that it helps the one left behind to move forward and accept the death.

To ask a Doctor to kill the patient is not giving love, it is giving up. Which is easy to do and we have gotten use to doing that in this society. We don't see the value in sacrifice. We don't see the value in what helping someone to die naturally gives to us. We only think of the easy way out.

No one wants their loved one (or themselves) in pain. I have talked to many nurses in the hospice field and they tell me that all pain can be managed. Sometimes towards the end, in order to manage the pain, the pain medicine does put one in a deep sleep. But the nurse knows when this will happen, so the family can say goodbye before the sleep happens. I realize that seems like semantics. What is the difference in the deep sleep that is followed by death and the forced death? One is a natural death, even though medicated for pain, and the other is a deliberate killing that both the patient and the doctor and the family are aware of. Not to keep bringing abortion into it, but it is like the difference between an abortion and a miscarriage.

Just as in assisted suicide, one breaks a precious bond and the other brings us natural grief.

I don't know if assisted suicide will become legal in this case, but I know that it will happen in my lifetime. I have always said it was a matter of time. There are simply not enough of us to fight those who see the value of human life only in terms of their own convience.