We all mourn suicides and our hearts go out to the families of people like Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. We rightly put millions into suicide prevention programs. How is it that the assisted suicide lobby considers it different when illness and a doctor are involved? Suicide can never be medical care.
Thankfully, we are seeing less and less disagreement about the public policy that morphs suicide into a supposed medical “treatment,” undermining the integrity of the medical profession — the very trust upon which the patient-physician relationship is based — and that puts everyone living in jurisdictions with legal assisted suicide at risk of deadly harm through mistakes, abuse, and coercion.
The American Medical Association’s (AMA) internationally respected Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs (CEJA), after two years of thorough study of assisted suicide, both here in the small handful of U.S. states and in the few countries abroad that have legalized it, produced a reportrecommending that the AMA maintain its long-standing opposition position to physician assisted suicide. This recommendation will likely be ratified by the AMA’s House of Delegates at their annual meeting, solidifying their position for years to come that “Physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.”
Read more at The Hill…