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Quotes about Physician-assisted Suicide from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"We have no right to suicide, yet we insist that respect for "patient autonomy" requires that we have a right to physician-assisted suicide.11 Reconsider the basic facts of the case. For fifteen years, Terri Schiavo's half-alive body lay in bed. Ostensibly, during all this time, both her husband and her parents wanted to "help" her. Initially, they helped her to stay alive. No one then spoke of Terri's wish to be killed. Then came a sudden reversal, when Michael "remembered" Terri's alleged verbal living will." - Thomas Szasz, The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays (Get the book.) "Michael requested the court to attribute to Terri the legally enforceable right to physician-assisted suicide. That this decision favored Michael's personal and financial interests, and the taxpayers' economic interests, was purely coincidental. The Schiavo case—like Shakespeare's Lear or Hamlet—was and remains great drama. It holds up a mirror, as it were, that reflects our selfishness in conflict with our attachments, our moral uncertainties and vanities, and, above all else, our boundless hypocrisies about drugs, dying, and medical care." - Thomas Szasz, The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays (Get the book.) "The practice of routinely referring to the ostensible beneficiary of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) as a "patient," albeit seemingly harmless, prejudges the act as medical and legitimizes it as beneficial ("therapeutic"). To be sure, a person dying of a terminal illness is, ipso facto, considered a patient. However, dying is not a disease; it may, inter alia, be a consequence of disease (or other causes, such as accident or violence). More importantly, killing (oneself or someone else) is not, and by definition cannot be, a treatment." - Thomas Szasz, The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays (Get the book.) "The term "physician-assisted suicide" is a euphemism, similar to terms like "pro-choice" (for abortion) and "right to life" (for prohibiting abortion). We ought to reject PAS not only as social policy but also as a conventionally used phrase, especially so long as suicide remains illegal, prohibited by mental health law and punished by psychiatric agents of the state. Words are important. We must be careful about what we call the persons who receive and deliver suicide-assistance services." - Thomas Szasz, The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays (Get the book.)

"In the Netherlands, physician-assisted suicide for those facing a life no longer worth living is an acknowledged part of a public policy that requires the physician to follow a carefully prescribed protocol.2 In the United States, a great debate is currently taking place over whether physician-assisted suicide should be legal. Many American physicians do assist patients in dying if all that remains is a painful existence without dignity." - Michael Lerner, Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer (Get the book.)

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