Targeting People With Mental Illness and Dementia for Euthanasia
Alas, the first small legal steps toward permitting the demented and mentally ill to access suicide by doctor have already been taken. After California legalized assisted suicide for the terminally ill, the Department of State Hospitals promulgated a regulation requiring that patients who have been involuntarily committed — and who have become terminally ill — be provided access to assisted suicide despite their mental illness. By definition such people are not legally competent, or else why would they be involuntary hospitalized?
Meanwhile, Nevada just enacted a law that allows dementia patients to instruct caregivers to withhold “food and water” once they reach incapacity toward the end that they starve to death. Please note that this first-of-a-kind law isn’t about refusing a feeding tube or preventing force-feeding. Rather, the law (SB 121) permits patients selves to be refused “food and water” — even if they willingly eat, perhaps even if they ask caregivers for sustenance. That’s homicide by neglect
The thing one has to remember is that if your ever told by your doctor(s) that you have an incurable debilitating and TERMINAL disease, that you will likely have perhaps 5-6 years left to live, and that during this time you will slowly(?) lose your memory, suffer frightening hallucinations, and look at your spouse of many years as a total stranger. And on occasion(s) LASH OUT at them both verbally and physically, you might consider the option of planning ahead, that when your wheelchair bound, can no longer speak, and require two trained professionals to take care of your most personal needs. You just may want to consider, while you’re still of reasonably sound mind, to ease the burden on your spouse, that when a certain point of no return is reached your physician will put you “to sleep” just like the Vet. does with a pet
Just remember in places like Belgium and Holland, once this decision is made there is no going back, no changing your mind, because to the doctors you don’t have one anymore.
Of course I’m talking about deciding one’s own fate. Unfortunately it wasn’t me, It was my wonderful wife of 25+ years. The woman I planned to grow old with, to travel, and play with grandchildren. That’s not going to happen.
The signs were there before the official diagnosis. I’m not going to describe the three plus years of what it was like to be a caregiver to someone with dementa. Only someone who has experenced the the ordeal themselves would comprehend.
After a lot of tears the unsoken decision between us was that we would carry on as long as we could. For some time she didn’t want friends or her family to know of her condition. She made no living will of any desire of any assisted suicide prior to the disease taking its natural course. She is not in any physical pain.
A cocktale of drugs would delay the symptoms for a while. And for nearly two years they did. Then the decline accelerated finally to a point where I could not care for her any more.
She is now in a nursing home, wheelchair bound, can barly speak, and requires two attendants to care for her personal needs.
I visit her everyday. She knows me. She EATS !
My wife is on Medicaid, an entitlement that she more then qualified for and we’re very glad to have to cover most of the cost of her care. Otherwise it would have been financially beyond our reach. Most people don’t anticipate or plan for something like this when in their twenties
I’m told the time will come when she will simply stop eating, when will be determined by a higher power. not by the doctors, not by me, and “not by the State”…for now.
She will leave this world when the Lord decides to take her.
That may no longer be an option if the proponants of ‘Single Payer Health care” obtain political power to make it a reality. It would cost $TRILLIONS (that’s 1 Billion dollars x thousands). Rationing will be a certainty. especially for the very young, the very old, and the terminally ill (did someone say “death panels”)Will a culture of death descend on American health care as it already has in Europe.
Life and death decisions concering You and your loved ones most likely will no longer be between You, your Doctor, and God, but will be decided by a faceless State bureaucracy.
And when they decide that your no longer worth the expense (perhaps a guideline will be your “Social Credit”), and the natural course of the illness has taken longer then expected (allowed), you or your loved one will be terminated by trained professionals quickly and painlessly.
And there is nothing you will be able to say to stop it.
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