I think Judge Neil Korsuch is probably against death with dignity, though I don't know what his use of the term assisted suicide means. Huffington Post says:
In actuality, the practice is having assistance in killing yourself (suicide), but in fact it could sometimes be called a way to end the unrelenting pain with those people who are terminal. I'd like him to empathize with loved ones having to watch their spouse, sibling, or parent suffer.
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I will never be able to stop my eidetic memories of my wife’s last days seven years ago, especially when I am trying to fall asleep. It still takes an effort to replace those vivid images with happy memories of our 40 years together.
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When I was 20 and living away from home, my sister was 16 our mother was dying of matastisized brain cancer. She was dying a horribly painful and undignified death at home with a visitng nurse coming in during the day while my sister was in school. Then my sister had to care for her. She begged my sister to help her kill herself. My sister was 16!
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I don’t want to be too graphic, but it is necessary to remind people who haven’t experienced this what undignified means. It often means losing bowl control. It often means losing your appetite and wasting away. It often means bedsores and total dependency on nurses. It often means being hooked up to tubes and machines.
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My wife not only had to have dialysis every other day but because of getting a disease called thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP) a rare blood disorder and an extremely rare side effect of Gemcitabine chemotherapy. In TTP, blood clots form in small blood vessels throughout the body. This can result in total destruction of kidney function.
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To try to reverse this, and avoid the need for dialysis, requires plasmapheresis. This involved being hooked up to a machine for several hours for five days. The machine gradually replaces all your blood plasma with fresh donated plasma.
Suffice to say, this treatment didn’t save her kidneys.
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Pain or not, it should still be the person's decision.
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Why should someone have to end their lives in ways that are anything else but dignified. Two of my friends have to live with the memories of a loved ones suicides. One they found hanging, and the other they found laying on chair with the results of having shot themselves in the head.
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I'm in Oregon now, where it is legal, but when my wife was dying in pain so severe seven years ago in Massachusetts that no medication relieved it, she desperately wanted to get it over with.
Fortunately with her, because the anti-cancer drugs caused her kidneys to shut down and she was on dialysis, she only had to stop dialysis knowing she would die in about five days.
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She was told by her doctors that this was the way they would choose to die because you simply drifted off to sleep and never woke up.
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What they didn’t tell her that the agonizing paid from her cancer would mean she’d be in excruciating pain before she died. She didn’t know that before the nurse could administer a massive IV of Fentanyl which the knew would speed her death, all her veins had collapse. They had to call in a specialized nurse who still couldn’t find a vein. Eventually nurses had to hold her flailing arms down to finally get the needle in. The ideal drug for this level of pain is heroin, which is used in the U.K. and the Netherlands. We know what the chances are of this ever being approved in the United States are.
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As she drifted off into her last sleep, she was remembering being a child at her best girlfriend’s house. Her last word talking to her friend was “the house by the river.”
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She died in severe (off the charts) pain, but at least she knew it would be over once and for all. She was totally alert and she had a chance to be with me and her close friends and her parents.
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Judge Gorsuch, I wish there was a way you could read this.
The legal argument
From the Amazon review of The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia
After assessing the strengths and weaknesses of arguments for assisted suicide and euthanasia, Gorsuch builds a nuanced, novel, and powerful moral and legal argument against legalization, one based on a principle that, surprisingly, has largely been overlooked in the debate--the idea that human life is intrinsically valuable and that intentional killing is always wrong. At the same time, the argument Gorsuch develops leaves wide latitude for individual patient autonomy and the refusal of unwanted medical treatment and life-sustaining care, permitting intervention only in cases where an intention to kill is present.
Think of the implications of that last sentence. Where is there “individual patient autonomy” in refusing unwanted medical treatment?
If intervention is permitted only in cases where an intention to kill is present it means that doctors can force treatment on their patients.
In 1990 the U.S. Supreme Court did rule that patients or their designated health care agents may refuse life-preserving medical treatment, including feeding tubes. A health care agent is an individual named by the patient to make health care decisions on their behalf, usually through a durable power of attorney. Health care agents typically follow a patient's wishes laid out in a living will or "do not resuscitate" form. FindLaw
It is possible Gorsuch would rule to overturn this law.
It also means that Judge Gorsuch believes that do not resuscitate orders signed by people should be illegal.
Here are the states that have death with dignity laws.