Dear Editor:
Re: Choosing her own fate, Burnaby NOW, Jan. 24. Assisted suicide should be legal. Doctor-assisted suicide should be set aside as a separate issue. It clouds the main point. It slows the whole debate.
You can learn how to kill someone in a few days. It takes seven years or more to become a doctor. Most importantly, doctor-assisted suicide goes against the doctor's primary purpose - to save life. It's outside the job description. No wonder the doctors resist.
Doctors have enough worries trying to keep us alive. No doctor should ever be accused of encouraging a suicide to free a hospital bed or to provide an organ to another patient. No doctor should ever have such doubts of his own actions. No doctor should ever say "Did I do enough to help that person survive, or did I just take the easy route?"
The ending of life is an entirely different job and requires an entirely different set of skills. Done properly, it requires that the person doing the job determine that quality of life is the issue and not just temporary depression. If it is determined that the depression is temporary, the person would be sent back to the healers. If not, the patient would proceed with their rights to a person skilled at killing.
Parliament needs to allow assisted suicide, but it needs to be done right by the right people. Doctors should be written out of the plan. They have enough to deal with. If the issues are properly separated, the decision should be easy to reach.
Albert Melenius, Burnaby
