Oregon Department of Human Services Against Assisted Suicide!

No, not the act of a doctor lethally prescribing poison to a patient for use in suicide. Rather, the Department of Human Services—ever compliant with assisted suicide advocacy goals—will now call the act of doctors lethally prescribing overdoses of drugs for use in suicide, “physician-assisted death.”

This is so par for the course in Oregon. The Department claims to be neutral about Oregon’s peculiar institution, but it is so in the tank with the assisted suicide advocates’ agendas. For example, the first few years of assisted suicide in Oregon, the statistical analysis published by the Department—based on self reporting of the prescribing death doctors—showed that some doctors refused to issue a lethal prescription when asked. To get the lethal prescription, some patients just went doctor shopping, generally finding doctors referred by assisted suicide advocates to write the prescriptions.

The Department received information from death doctors, but not those physicians who refused to help kill their patients. But at least when opponents of the law pointed out this little flaw in record keeping out, the Department acted: No, of course it didn’t call the refusing doctors to find out more information about these patients. It merely stopped publishing the specifics about the number of doctors who refused to aid in suicide.

This is just further proof of what we have seen since the law went into effect: When it comes to assisted suicide, the policy of the Oregon Department of Health is to see no evil, hear no evil, and speak in euphemisms. Pathetic.