Below is the text of an email I sent to California's State Senators on 02 June 2015 regarding the state's euthanasia/assisted suicide bill SB-128 presently being considered. I am informed it will be before the Senate this week.
______________________________
To:
The Hon. Bill Monning, California State Senate Majority Leader, The Hon. Bob
Huff, California State Senate Minority Leader
Dear Senators:
Please forward this email to your senators prior to debating Senate Bill
128.
You will soon be considering Senate Bill 128 “End of Life Option Act”. It
would enact an Oregon style assisted suicide/euthanasia law for
terminally ill Californians. I ask you to reject this bill outright. As you're probably aware, as the Oregon experience verifies, the parameters of laws
quickly move outside terminal illness to include non-terminal chronic illness
and disability.
I have been incurably ill and disabled with degenerative multiple sclerosis
(MS) for over 30 years. During the early years with my disease, my sorrow was so
deep and my heartache so sharp, my judgement became clouded by grief. Had I not
been surrounded by people who lifted up my value – even when I doubted my own
value – I might have taken my life at a low point. When I was a 30 year old man,
before the onset of MS, if some clairvoyant told me I would one day be in an
electric wheelchair with only 1 limb unimpaired by disease, I would have
rejected such a life. Back then, being able-bodied, active and athletic defined
quality of life for me. And yet today, at the age of 62, my life has quality.
Why? My standard for quality of life changed over time. Today what gives me
quality of life is to love and to be loved. I have five beautiful grandchildren
I would never have known if assisted suicide had been available to me during the
1980s.
I am a Canadian. As you know Canada’s Supreme Court recently struck down my
nation’s laws against assisted suicide, opening wide the gates for physician
assisted killing of suicidal sick and disabled people. Please do not take
California down a similar path. It is not the hallmark of a “civil society”.
There is nothing civilized about euthanasia or assisted suicide. Do not be
fooled by euphemisms for killing like “death with dignity”. Dignity is not
bestowed on people by injecting them with poison when they are at their lowest
point. That is abandonment not dignity. Death with dignity is not an event, it
is a process, the end result of having lived a life with dignity, benefiting
from the best 21st Century palliative care (which is capable of eliminating
physical pain), and being surrounded by loved ones.
Someone may say “What about those who do not have loved ones?” Precisely!
What about them? Is the answer to euthanize them or seek to include them within
the tender embrace of community? Another person may say, “I should have the
autonomous right to determine the time and place of my own death.” Really? That
presumes decisions only affect the individual making them. That is not true. Our
decisions always impact others. The idea independent personal autonomy is
diametrically opposed to the concept of interdependent community.
If I choose suicide (assisted or otherwise) it will not affect just me: It
will affect my wife, children and grandchildren. It will impact my community and
my doctor for I will ask her to stop being my healer and become my killer. And
it will affect my nation by helping to entrench the notion that there are some
lives unworthy to be lived.
No, good senators of California, do not pass SB 128. Seek options that
affirm life with dignity -- even when that life is drawing to its close. I have
such love and affection for America; I do not want to see more states passing
legislation that allows the taking of human life. It makes a nation poorer not
richer. I can tell you that with the real dread and apprehension of my nation of
Canada.
I am,
Respectfully yours,
Mark Davis Pickup
Canada
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