LETTER: Nevada assisted suicide bill isn’t the answer

Assisted suicide decreases patient choice, damages the medical profession and lacks adequate “safeguards” to prevent abuse. As a nurse, my job is to provide support, comfort and care to patients. Assisted suicide undermines my role as a caregiver and fails to address the primary reasons that patients seek this option.

Touted as increasing patient autonomy, it in fact does the opposite. Once legalized, physicians and insurance companies become the decision makers with euthanasia now a “treatment option.” There are documented cases of patients in California being offered assisted suicide instead of life-saving or life-extending care. Nearly every disability group opposes this option as they continually deal with decreased access to care.

The argument that assisted suicide is taking place without problems in states where it is legal is false. The Disability Rights and Education Fund has documented abuses in Oregon and Washington that include: doctor shopping, a lack of psychiatric consultations, coercion by family members and economic conditions, and a breakdown in the following of rules and conduct attendant to the law.

Any case that can be made for assisted suicide based on quality of life or the loss of autonomy due to terminal illness can be made for non-terminal illnesses and psychiatric conditions, also. It is alarming that patients in Oregon and Colorado were prescribed lethal drugs for anorexia nervosa, a mental disability.

Assisted suicide “safeguards” become “barriers” with successful or proposed efforts to reduce waiting periods to mere hours instead of weeks, to remove the self-administration requirement and to eliminate residency requirements. The incremental strategy that has followed legalization is disastrous. Nevadans must be aware of the dangers of assisted suicide. I urge our Legislature to reject this policy, and instead work to increase access to quality medical care.