“Assisted suicide” vs. “Aid in Dying”: They both mean the same thing in the context of the right of a person to make his or her own decisions about his or her own end of life, but some self-righteous, narrow-minded, dogmatic religious fanatics who are obstinately convinced of the superiority or correctness of their own opinions and prejudices against those who hold different opinions seem to think that if they stir peoples’ emotions up they can win this battle and prevent those who want this choice from being able to have it legally and without prejudice.
It has been shown that words make a difference. Words evoke emotions based on beliefs. In polls where people are asked if they approve of Death With Dignity Acts, the results are skewed against when the word “suicide” is used in place of “aid in dying.” It is an emotional issue that plays with peoples’ fears and insecurities, not just about the meaning in this life but in the next life. Self-righteous religious people hold up their beliefs about the sanctity of life to guilt vulnerable, frightened people into needless suffering at the end of life. They are trying to legislate their version of morality as if they were right and the majority of people who are in favor of Death With Dignity are all wrong.
This one guy who regularly spews his right-to-life platitudes and insists, in his most recent blog, that “aid in dying” is a euphemism for “assisted suicide” is particularly annoying the way he twists the truth to fit his beliefs. HIS beliefs! The man seems to have no compassion, just opinions about what’s right for the rest of us. Just because he hasn’t evolved consciously enough to realize the difference between a distraught person who wants to end his or her life and a dying person who doesn’t want to die but makes an informed decision to leave his body on his or her own terms doesn’t mean he won’t have his Aha! moment on his own death bed and have a change of heart.
It doesn’t really matter whether it’s called aid in dying or assisted suicide. Quibbling over semantics is just a smokescreen. A dying person who knows when this body no longer serves the soul and is ready to go home is the determinant factor.
Just a suggestion but instead of using fear tactics, put your energy into seeing to it that good laws are passed in all states that will protect people from having death forced upon them because they are senile or poor or severely disabled or by external forces and empower assisting physicians to fulfill requests for prescriptions.
We are already doing a good job of killing people with all our air, water and land pollution; not paying attention to climate changes; cutting funding to social programs; and not caring about the homeless or victims of the economic downturn, or the mentally ill who are cast adrift. Aside from all the murders and mass shootings, people in this country are starving to death, freezing to death, dying in the streets, in our forests, in rivers, in the ocean, jumping off bridges because they aren’t able to survive in this economic climate. Nobody seems to care about these people. And yet some people want to stop other people from being able to self-administer prescribed medicine to shorten a dying process they find unbearable. Tch. Tch.
Let's talk about death and dying... 