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Is there such a thing as a 'right to die'?
by ALL
Released September 3, 2009
Let's say a close friend of yours is really sick. According to doctors and specialists, your friend has about a 20% chance of living through the next year. Your friend is in incredible pain around the clock. Now, what if your friend was so desperate and had lost so much hope that he wanted to die? What if your friend asked you to help him die? What would you do? Would you help relieve your friend's pain by helping to kill him?
The idea of killing a close friend or family member sounds ridiculous, but it happens. It's called assisted suicide, or euthanasia. And it's legal in three states. The people of Oregon and Washington vote in favor of it. In addition a Judge Dorothy McCarter in Montana has ruled that assisted suicide in that state is a legal practice. What’s even more disturbing is that there are cases reported from all over the country.
A 21-year-old college student, Roosevelt Dawson, who had been paralyzed by a spinal infection, wanted to die so badly that he took the hospital to court for the right to leave. He won the court battle, was released from the hospital, and was dead just a few hours later. Jack Kevorkian gave him a lethal injection.
Assisted-suicide charges against the husband and son of Velma Howard have been dropped by Newton County (MO) prosecutor Greg Bridges. Velma, who had ALS, had travelled to a Joplin, MO, motel with her husband Bernard J. Howard and son Bernard A. Howard. After the elder Howards celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, Velma's son prepared a solution of orange juice, vodka, and sleeping pills, mixed narcotics into some pudding, and gave his mother a plastic bag and rubber bands to secure it around her neck. He then read to her play-by-play instructions from the suicide manual Final Exit.
A 26-year-old quadriplegic man was given a lethal injection in California. Jack Kevorkian dropped off the man's body at a hospital in Michigan.
And these are just a few. There are hundreds of cases just like these three that have been reported in the last couple of years. Assisted suicide backers hope you are no longer shocked. If that is indeed the case, the case will be made that assisted suicide is not a crime - it is a constitutional right. The groundwork has already been set.
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