Hospice Care Versus Physician-Assisted Suicide

Fear of abandonment, fear of unbearable suffering, depression and despair are the root causes of suicide in the terminally ill. Hospice care demonstrates that terminally ill patients need not be left to die alone or in unfamiliar, sterile environments, and that pain and other symptoms can be prevented or adequately treated. The choice is ours. To enact legislation allowing physician-assisted suicide is to plunge our society more deeply into the culture of death. It is imperative to defeat such legislation, and in its place to enact legislation which would increase the resources available to bring competent, compassionate health care to patients and families in their homes -- not only in the last six months of their lives as is presently done in hospice programs, but also long term for the chronically ill, the severely disabled and the frail elderly. In doing so we would have to our credit a major step toward transforming our culture of violence and death into a civilization of love and life. Hospice Vs. PAS