New 'Assisted Suicide Watch' Will Oppose the Big-Death Industrial Complex, Help Educate on End-of-Life Matters for All

**ASW will serve as a trusted source and national clearinghouse for information on the growing threat to human dignity and life itself.**

, /PRNewswire/ -- As the world awaits updated news on Pope Francis' grave medical condition, renewed attention is being given to the broader subject of good end-of-life care that allows for a peaceful, dignified passing, if that is to be. Such a "good death" should not be reserved just for popes or other prominent people, it should be available to all the people we love. And a good death does not include suicide, and certainly not physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia ("mercy killing").

Aging with Dignity, a national non-profit organization with a mission to affirm and safeguard human dignity at the end of life, announces the creation of Assisted Suicide Watch. ASW will track, expose and oppose state and national efforts to expand physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. It will challenge the well-funded effort to convince people that suicide-affirming care is a social good.

"We fully support patient self-determination, but killing yourself or forcing doctors to participate is not the answer because it cheapens human dignity," Aging with Dignity founder and CEO Jim Towey said. "Physicians are healers, not executioners. People need genuine compassion and choices, not the false choice of pain or poison."

Through euphemisms ("death with dignity") and emotional appeals, suicide is being falsely represented by Big Death as a solution to a problem instead of the symptom of one. 

The proven arguments against physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia include:

• It normalizes suicide;
• It discriminates against the disabled;
• It destroys the doctor-patient relationship;
• It introduces a dreadful option for non-terminally ill patients;
• It creates perverse cost-savings for government, health insurers, and health care providers; and
• It ensures that the so-called "right to die" will become a duty to die for the poor, those with chronic diseases or cognitive impairment, and others who live at the mercy of society.

In the U.S. and other countries where physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia have been permitted, legal guardrails and patient protections are later deemed to be "obstacles" and "barriers." The killing has expanded in Europe to include minors and people with dementia, and in the U.S., to people with treatable conditions like anorexia and diabetes, along with those deemed too expensive to treat, like quadriplegics. In Canada, five percent of all deaths in the country are due to physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. Over 200,000 have died worldwide from these practices.

"They're saying to you, 'We won't help you live, but we'll help you kill yourself," Towey said. "The assisted suicide and euthanasia movement is based on a lie that pain cannot be managed, that suffering can't be alleviated and that you are a burden to others."

Instead of ending lives, Aging with Dignity promotes best practices in palliative care where timely referral to hospice services is routine, pain is managed, patients are accompanied, their suffering is treated with compassion, and their personal, spiritual and emotional needs are met and God-given human dignity maintained.

"If America's health care system routinely offered such humane services, public support for the legalization of euthanasia and assisted suicide would nearly vanish," Towey said.

Contact: Jamie Towey (202) 810-7492
[email protected]

SOURCE Aging With Dignity