The California media are atwitter with my state’s new assisted suicide law. And they are touting a death doctor named Lonny Shavelson who is opening a practice in suicide prescribing–for only $2000, if one decided to obtain the prescription.
Shavelson is a coward who once witnessed the murder of a disabled man by a Hemlock Society zealot and did nothing. Media misses that entirely.
But here’s the point. Shavelson has been a part time or contract ER doctor for his medical career. He is not a specialist in cancer, ALS, or other terminal conditions.
Would anyone in their right minds go to an ER doctor to treat his cancer, palliate pain or symptoms, or determine a proper medical course for kidney failure? Of course not!
But that isn’t what death doctoring is about. It’s just the legal ability to write a lethal prescription.
Despite his potential lack of medical expertise about conditions, he will be allowed to decide if a patient qualifies for death doctoring, and he could well be wrong as he can’t possibly keep up with all the changes in a particular field as do real medical specialists in those areas of practice.
But that doesn’t matter. All that matters under the assisted suicide law is having the MD degree and the license allowing him to write a lethal prescription.
That means the most incompetent doctors–the utter bottom feeders–can become death doctors.
Shavelson will be helping to off people with illnesses out of his specialty–just as happened with Kevorkian–a pathologist–and in has in Oregon.
And yet, the clueless and in-the-tank media oooh and aaah!
LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D., is a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture and a bioethics attorney who blogs at Human Exeptionalism.
