Assisted Euthanasia Quotes

Think of all those ages through which men have had the courage to die, and then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having the courage to live.

A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured.

I lived my whole life following others’ wishes. Let me follow my own wish in my death.

They said 'specialist children's wards,' But they meant children-killing centers. They said 'final medical assistance' But they meant murder.

We must be willing to accept the bitter truth that, in the end, we may have to become a burden to those who love us. But it is necessary that we face this also. The full acceptance of our abjection and uselessness is the virtue that can make us and others rich in the grace of God. It takes heroic charity and humility to let others sustain us when we are absolutely incapable of sustaining ourselves. We cannot suffer well unless we see Christ everywhere, both in suffering and in the charity of those who come to the aid of our affliction.

For us, it was never about death. It was about life. Knowing that there was a way out, and that his suffering was not going to become unendurable, was the one thing that allowed Mr. Peterson to go on living, much longer than he would have otherwise wanted. It was the weeks leading up to our pact that were shrouded in darkness and despair; after its inception, life became a meaningful prospect once more.

The experience of death is going to get more and more painful, contrary to what many people believe. The forthcoming euthanasia will make it more rather than less painful because it will put the emphasis on personal decision in a way which was blissfully alien to the whole problem of dying in former times. It will make death even more subjectively intolerable, for people will feel responsible for their own deaths and morally obligated to rid their relatives of their unwanted presence. Euthanasia will further intensify all the problems its advocates think it will solve.

The dilemma is awesome. But it has to be faced. Should you battle on, take the pain, endure the indignities, and await the inevitable end, which may be days, weeks, or months away? Or should you take control of the situation and resort to some form of euthanasia, which in its modern-language definition has come to mean “help with a good death”?

Self-destruction of a physically fit person is always a tragic waste of life and hurtful to survivors, but life is a personal responsibility. We must each decide for ourselves.

Providing information about how persons may end their life is not a crime, at least in the United States, or I would have spent many years behind bars!

The helium drives oxygen from the brain, causing rapid brain death and leaves no traces.

Legal, regulated voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide have far less potential for abuse, and when they are available, there is no need to make it easy for people to find out how to kill themselves.

What separates a chosen “good death” from a bad one almost always comes down, upon analysis, to the amount of planning, attention to detail, and the quality of the assistance, all of which are vital to decent termination of life.

Some doctors who specialize in the care of geriatric patients have told me that there are rare occasions when they have heard a very old, sick, and frail person announce, “I’m going to die today.” And the individual did. But it doesn’t happen often.

The key to the effectiveness of cyanide as a killer is the water. This is borne out by evidence in textbooks that flocks of sheep that have eaten plants containing cyanide do not die so long as they do not drink. If the animals are near water, the plants are fatal.

A slight deviation of the gun barrel and the bullet misses vital organs but inflicts terrible wounds. Reports in newspapers and journals indicate that the preferred method is to put the gun into the mouth and shoot upward, but even here there have sometimes been survivors.

Involuntary euthanasia – This is the most controversial way of hastened death, yet it goes on widely and secretly everywhere. Only the Dutch admit to it. It is sometimes necessary when a patient is suddenly, unexpectedly dying in agony, cannot communicate their wishes, and so the attending doctor administers a merciful end.

However much the drink is loaded with sweeteners, patients say it still tastes awful. Usually observers have noticed that the patients are so desperate to die that they ignore the nasty tasting drink. The Oregon dosage is:   Seconal capsules reduced to powder - 9 grams & Pure water - 4 ounces – OR –   Liquid Nembutal - 9 grams & Add water to suit

Assistance in suicide has never been against the law in Switzerland, Uruguay, Norway, and Germany provided the circumstances were provably compassionate and justifiable. You would be unwise to think of going to one of those countries, because they do not like strangers taking advantage of their laws. Also, the complications of securing your medical care and insurance would be horrendous.

Self-destruction by hanging is almost always an act of protest, a desire to shock and hurt someone. Therefore, believers in euthanasia avoid it. Even if the job of cutting down the body is left to the police or paramedics, this is an unacceptably selfish way to die, and I have never heard of a euthanasia supporter using it. Unless the neck is broken by the rope jerking the fall to a stop (as a professional hangman arranges), then it is death by strangulation, often not so quick.

Death comes quickly in bitterly cold water from hypothermia. The lower the temperature, the faster the end. But there is always the chance that someone of whom you are not aware is watching and there is a possibility of rescue. This manner of suicide also leaves unanswered questions for survivors. Was it deliberate (if no note is left) or accidental? Will the body ever be found? Will there be an extensive search for the body, risking other people’s lives and a great deal of public expense?

That fall it was the most talked about book in America, because the pundits could not fathom why a book giving guidance on suicide could be in such huge demand. What, they asked, had happened to America?   The simple answer was perhaps contained in my response on ABC-TV’s Nightline program when Barbara Walters asked me: 'Why is it a best-seller, Mr. Humphry?' My reply was: 'Because everybody dies, and nearly every person wonders, however privately, what form that death will take. They’re looking to Final Exit for options.

In the Netherlands, a nationwide government-commissioned study found that ‘many patients want an assurance that their doctor will assist them to die should suffering become unbearable’. Often, having received this assurance, no request for euthanasia eventuated. The availability of euthanasia brought comfort without euthanasia having to be provided.

the scale of Canada’s euthanasia and assisted suicide program is staggering. For comparison, California legalized assisted suicide in 2016, the same year Canada passed the first version of its Medical Assistance in Dying program. Canada and California have similar populations, about 40 million. In 2021, just 486 people in California committed suicide under the state program. In Canada, the death toll was more than 10,000,

Other news reports told of Canadians facing homelessness or credit card debt, or requesting help with disabilities, only to be offered euthanasia instead by Canada’s national health system. The country’s Department of Veterans Affairs was prolific in this regard, recommending euthanasia to veterans struggling with depression and PTSD, and in one case suggesting euthanasia to a former Paralympian in response to repeated requests for a home wheelchair ramp. “Madam, if you are really so desperate, we can give you medical assistance in dying now,” the caseworker allegedly said.

Earlier this month, the Vatican’s top bioethics official condemned as “reprehensible” the assisted suicide of an East Bay woman, Brittany Maynard, who was suffering terminal brain cancer and said she wanted to die with dignity. Francis didn’t refer to the Maynard case specifically. While denouncing euthanasia in general, he also condemned abortion, in vitro fertilization and embryonic stem cell research.

It is significant that the major world religions having studied the problem of unrelieved suffering for over 2000 years, have independently concluded that there is no justification for euthanasia or PAS. There

To withdraw life-prolonging treatments when these are no longer of benefit to the patient is to recognise the limits of a doctor's power, allowing the dying person to die as a consequence of their underlying disease. This is clinically, ethically and legally different from deliberately ending life as in euthanasia or PAS." Arguments

There is a tendency today to turn moral issues into amoral ones, to argue that many of the decisions and choices we make are merely personal choices that lie outside the ethical purview. For example, in the current debate about euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide, some argue that this is not a moral issue but simply a matter of controlling one’s life. Ethical questions need not be raised.

No. 1, when you ask who’s interested in this, the usual answer is, terminally ill people with excruciating pain. False. Factually not true. It tends to be a preoccupation of people who are depressed or hopeless for other reasons. No surprise, actually, if you look at what leads to suicide: hopelessness and depression. You have to look at euthanasia or assisted suicide as more like suicide than like a good death. Second, this notion that there’s no slippery slope, as advocates have long claimed? Totally wrong. Look at Belgium and the Netherlands: First, it’s accepted for adults who are competent and give consent. Then, it’s “We’re going to extend it to neonates with genetic defects, and adolescents.” Any time we do anything in medicine, it’s the same way: We develop an intervention for a narrow group of people, and once it’s well accepted, it gets expanded. I think it’s false to say, “We can hold the line here.” It doesn’t work that way. Third, people say this is a quick, reliable, painless intervention. No medical intervention in history is quick, reliable, painless and has no flaws. In the Netherlands, there’s about a 17 to 20 percent rate of problems, something screwing up. Initially, when the Oregon people published — “We have no problems. Every case went flawlessly!” — you knew the data was wrong. It had to be wrong. Either you’re not getting every case, so the denominator was wrong, or people are lying. There’s nobody who does a procedure, not even blood draws, and it’s perfect every time. So this idea that this is quick, reliable and painless is nonsense. And the last and most important point is: You want to legalize these interventions to improve end-of-life care in this country? That’s your motivation and this is your method? PS: I don’t think people argue that–— ZE: [interrupting] Oh, people do argue that! That is the justification for these procedures: It’s going to improve end-of-life care and give people control. The problem is, even in countries that have legalized it for a long time, at best 3 percent of people die this way in the Netherlands and Belgium. At best, 10 percent express interest in it. That is not a way to improve end-of-life care. You don’t focus lots of attention and effort on 3 percent. It’s the 97 percent, if you want to improve care. The typical response is, we can do both. Hmmm. Every system I’ve ever seen has a bandwidth problem: You can only do so much. We ought to focus our attention on the vast, vast majority, 97 percent of people, for whom this is not the right intervention and get that right — and we are far from that. I don’t think legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide are the way to go. It’s a big, big distraction.

In the Netherlands, where euthanasia was legalized in 2002, some legislators have argued that the law should go even further, so that all people above a certain threshold age can receive a physician-assisted death, even if they aren’t suffering at all. In 2016, the country’s health minister, Edith Schippers, proposed a measure that would have allowed elderly people with “a well-considered opinion that their life is complete” to qualify. This, she said in a statement to parliament, would help “older people who do not have the possibility to continue life in a meaningful way, who are struggling with the loss of independence and reduced mobility, and who have a sense of loneliness, partly because of the loss of loved ones, and who are burdened by general fatigue, deterioration, and loss of personal dignity.

EXIT’s justification was that until a law permitting voluntary euthanasia was passed (which would place responsibility to help primarily on physi­cians), people had no alternative but to take their dying into their own hands.

We are moved by what pro-life feminists call the "consistency thing" -- the belief that respect for human life demands opposition to abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, and war. We don't think we have the luxury or the right to choose some types of killing and say that they are all right, while others are not. A human life is a human life; and if equality means anything, it means that society may not value some human lives over others.

Non-goblins are strongly urged to avoid Goblintown at all costs. There are parts we recommend goblins do not even venture into unless part of a highly trained and well armed cram. If one still feels the urge to visit Goblintown, we recommend seeking counseling to eliminate the suicidal tendencies. Should this fail or not be desirable, we suggest using one of the many fine Euthanasia Houses our world has to offer. (See Euthanasia Houses, Suicide Assistants.) Not only will they strive to make the experience pleasant, but they will beautify your corpse and deliver it intact to your next of kin or designated recipient, along with a valid proof of death, allowing your affairs to be put in order. Goblintown has no such guarantees, and the odds of a corpse leaving intact are minimal. However, there is an excellent chance of your head being made into a warning decoration. (See illustrations.)”    -A Visitor’s Guide to Traven, 144th Edition

In the year following the 1991 publication of Final Exit, Derek Humphry’s best-selling book, which presented in detail a variety of ways to commit suicide (including, prominently, suffocation by plastic bag), suicidal asphyxiations involving plastic bags increased by 31 percent. Peter Marzuk and his colleagues at Cornell University Medical College in New York noted that although the total number of suicides did not increase, the publicity surrounding this particularly lethal method may have had a deadly impact on impulsive and ambivalent individuals. They suggest, “with good cause, that clinicians include in their assessments of suicide risk questions not only about actions of potential concern, such as writing suicide notes or drawing up wills, but whether patients have obtained and read literature about euthanasia or assisted suicide.

When a doctor is prescribing a lethal concoction to be taken orally, the drugs are best taken in a dissolved liquid, which can be downed quickly. The occasional delayed-action death is almost always caused by the patient falling asleep before taking enough.

There is a growing moral view that patients should take charge of their own ends now that more sophisticated means of suicide – as described in this book – are available.

If assistance is justifiable, a date is fixed for the final exit in the presence of two visitors who are there to give advice and moral support, but who do not break the law by physically assisting. The means by which the patient is to die have been agreed on beforehand: either drugs, or helium injected into a plastic hood. The helium method has been proven to be the quickest and most peaceful.

We have become so brainwashed by the fast, usually bloodless, and always painless deaths shown continually by the movie and television production industry that our collective perceptions of the act of death are sanitized. Whether by gunshot or through illness, the actor just rolls over and that’s the end. We want so much to believe that this is true that we don’t question it.

The medical Power of Attorney is legally enforceable, whereas the Living Will is not. It may seem like a man using both a belt and braces to keep his trousers up, but experience shows that if you care about a good death you cannot be too careful.

If you have not already done so, sign a Living Will and have it witnessed, but not by anybody who is going to gain from the Last Will and Testament dealing with your estate. A Living Will, which has nothing to do with property or money, is an advance declaration of your wish not to be connected to life-support equipment if it is judged that you are hopelessly and terminally ill.

With the medical Power of Attorney given to someone in whom you have already confided your general or specific wishes, someone who has accepted the responsibility, then it is most likely that you will get the kind of treatment – or dignified death – that you desire. A doctor must get the approval of the person (also known as surrogate or attorney-in-fact) that you have named. This is especially important if there is disagreement in the family about what to do. The surrogate person has the absolute right to make the final decision, although only if you are too ill to make it yourself.

This book is chiefly about self-deliverance, assisted suicide, and euthanasia, which the Advance Declarations do not cover. But undoubtedly the very existence of two properly signed declarations would influence health care workers if a question of hastening a death arose. Membership in a right-to-die organization, and having read this book, are at present the two most powerful demonstrations a person can make of sincere beliefs in assisted dying.

Swiss law since 1937 permits assisted suicide by anyone for altruistic reasons, although it has become the accepted practice that first there must be a doctor’s agreement and only lethal drugs can be used, taken orally – no injections. Reporting the “terminal suicide” to the police is normal procedure – nothing secretive. The Swiss do not rule out visitors provided they meet the time-honored criteria – a dying, competent, adult, and a local doctor after examination agrees they are terminal.

First, it is not a crime in America to watch somebody kill themselves and do nothing to stop it. (It may be in some other countries, but this is untested and thus unclear.) Therefore, a person can give the dying patient the absolutely essential gift of being present at the deathbed because (a) nobody should have to die alone; and (b) the presence of a caring friend reduces the chance of the self-deliverance being botched. In nearly every case in which I hear of a failed self-deliverance, the dying person has acted alone.

There are a few people who tell me that they are so used to a solitary life that they will die alone, but even here I advise them that if they are thinking of self-deliverance the chances of the action not being botched are much better if a friend is present.

If you have to help a person die, say nothing. Let the police do their own sleuthing.

Touching the person in the act of helping him or her to die is where criminal liability is possible. Giving an injection, holding the cup to the mouth, helping to put a plastic bag over the head and securing it – all are actions that prosecutors could use to enforce existing laws against assistance in dying.

One of the most valuable services that hospice care offers is respite from the continual burden of care for the family member or members looking after a dying person. A hospice may be able to provide someone for several days, nights, or a week, to enable a stressed-out caregiver to take a break.

More than 40 percent of the suicides among chemists, both men and women, occur from swallowing cyanide, according to a report in the New York Times (9/4/87).

First, sodium thiopental is used to put the condemned individual to sleep; then follows Pavulon, a muscle relaxant similar to the South American poison curare, together with potassium chloride to stop the heart.

When choosing to die on a mountain or similar lonely place, it is considerate to leave a note saying where your body can be found. Otherwise, people might risk their lives and expend considerable resources hunting in dangerous places for you.

Not so bizarre, and a method for which I have respect, is freezing to death on a mountain. It takes a certain sort of person to want to die this way: having a love of and knowledge of mountains, determination, and the enduring courage to carry it off.

Another depressed man in southern California who collected rattlesnakes as a hobby deliberately allowed one of his pets to bite him five or six times on the right hand. He suffered a fatal heart attack.

There have been many sad cases of accidental deaths of people who lit charcoal fires in tents or rooms without proper ventilation. But this method done deliberately for suicide carries with it a huge potential for explosion or fires that could kill other people. Sometimes the gas has leaked into the rooms where innocent people were sleeping. In Florida in 1996 a French woman on vacation decided to kill herself by gas; not only did she die, but also her husband and daughter, which she had not intended – her suicide note spoke of her wanting them to live without her being a burden.

A few terminally ill persons I have known have quietly ascended their favorite mountain late in the day and made sure that they were above the freezing line for that particular time of the year. They used public transport to get there so that a parked car would not be spotted. Then, wearing light clothing, they sat down in a secluded spot to await the end.

Remember, there are two ways to starve oneself to death: without food and fluids, which is the quicker way but more painful; and with fluids only, which is slower but less painful. In both methods, painkilling drugs and skilled nursing are desirable.

If family circumstances unfortunately oblige you to end your life in a hospital or a motel, it is gracious to leave a note apologizing for the shock and inconvenience to the staff. I have also heard of individuals leaving a generous tip to the motel staff to compensate them for the disturbance caused.

It is astonishing how many people do not make a will – legal scholars say about 85 percent of the population dies intestate.