New Jersey

There is an old joke: What do you call the medical student who finished last in his class? Answer: “Doctor.”

The increasing legalization of assisted suicide has accorded that joke a disturbing pertinence. A doctor who prescribes poison need not be an excellent medical practitioner. He or she need not specialize in treating patients who present with particular life-threatening conditions, and indeed, can prescribe even if never treating the patient’s underlying condition at all.

For example, Jack Kevorkian was a pathologist who never treated a living patient after medical school. But if assisted suicide had been legal in his time, he would have been qualified to lethally prescribe. Along similar lines, before assisted suicide was legalized, the California death doctor Lonny Shavelson was a part-time ER doc who mostly pursued a career as a photojournalist and author.

Serious moves are afoot to allow ending the lives of dementia patients, either by allowing them to be killed by lethal jab euthanasia if requested in a written advance directive (where legal), or to allow a document to be signed requiring caregivers to withhold sufficient food and water to sustain life. New Jersey seems to move subtly in the latter direction with a vaguely worded bill, S.B. 4186, that could open the door to intentional legal undernourishment. From the bill: It is the public policy of this State to respect the dignity, autonomy, and previously expressed wishes of individuals living with dementia by authorizing Dementia-Specific Advance Directives (DSADs), establishing clear standards for “comfort feeding only,” and ensuring that such directives Read More ›