(October 4, 2009 at 9:57 am)Retorth Wrote: Granted, the word "kill" has been mentioned numerous times above and perhaps you mistook it for a reference to violence, but "assistance" here refers to the act of terminating the sufferer's life, be it a pill, an injection or "pulling the plug". Nobody said anything about taking a gun and shooting that person or stabbing that person or pushing that person off the top of a building.
That certainly would be insane.
I am well aware of what assistance means.
I am also well aware that religious nuts want to portray this assistance as an act of violence. That is why they always refer to it with misleading terminology that implies murder.
If you visit one of the religious nut websites and read their propaganda, you'll see what I mean.
Thus, my only point here is that we should not cooperate with their agenda by using their terminology to describe this issue. Anytime we use terms like "mercy killing, assisted suicide" we are doing exactly that.
Organizations that advocate for the "right of the terminally ill to hasten their death" do not use such terminology for that very reason. Check out Compassion & Choices.
We reject the idea that this is suicide or murder since the patient is already listed as "terminal" and death is already a certainty. We are merely advocating for the right of that person to end their suffering earlier if they choose to do so.
