New Jersey’s attorney general is asking the state’s top court to quickly overturn a judge’s ruling that barred doctors from prescribing life-ending medication to terminally ill patients.
The law, effective Aug. 1, was put on hold last week by a judge in Mercer County. On Friday, the first day doctors could have prescribed lethal medication under the law, the Attorney General’s Office asked the state Supreme Court to erase the judge’s order.
A lawyer for the Bergenfield doctor who filed the lawsuit last week — and who has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise $1 million for his legal fees — spoke out against the law on Monday, comparing it to the Holocaust. The plaintiff, Yosef Glassman, follows the conservative tenets of Orthodox Judaism.
Once doctors in Nazi Germany had deemed “life was unworthy of life,” it led to the murder of millions of Jews, lawyer E. David Smith said.
“Once you desensitize yourself to the value of life, the first time ending someone’s life there’s a lot of upheaval, the second time less, and so on and so forth” until it becomes millions, Smith said. New Jersey is “on the cusp of the desensitization of human life,” he said…
Opponents say it creates risk that the lethal medications will be misused and insurance companies may be more likely to encourage death than medical treatment, because it costs less.
New Jersey lawmakers approved the law by a single vote in each the Assembly and Senate earlier this year. Even Gov. Phil Murphy expressed hesitation over the bill before signing it in April…
Read more at NorthJersey.com