Empirical Answer To The Pain Argument: Good Pain Management, Not Death

We have to keep repeating, and repeating, and repeating: Every time the pro-deathers shriek that we need medicalized killing because people are in unbearable pain, we need to counter with a very simple empirical fact: In almost every case, people are suffering because of POOR PAIN MANAGEMENT and a lack of POOR PALLIATIVE CARE.

Euthanasia pushes past pain barrier

WHEN David Scott Mathers escaped a jail sentence for suffocating his chronically ill partner, much was made of her pain. Eva Griffith had wanted to die and her considerable pain was referred to 16 times last week in Justice Peter Hall's judgment, which concluded the manslaughter to which Mathers had pleaded guilty was ''a selfless act born out of the love the offender held for her''.

In Australia it is often assumed pain would be the main reason for voluntary euthanasia, or assisted suicide, yet evidence from the US suggests Griffith's circumstances were unusual. more