Judith Schwartz, Article-Writing Nurse About Hospice Care, is Committed Assisted Suicide Advocate

UPDATE: I love the readers of SHS. I just heard from a nurse who has the original article and Schwartz’s Compassion and Choices affiliation is disclosed there. That means that the full ID was not published along with the article on-line. Not great, but definitely the best scenario in this situation. I have changed the title accordingly and deleted the text dealing with allegations of misleading by omission.

Yesterday, here at SHS, I criticized an article originally published in the American Nursing Journal, in which the author, “Judith Schwartz, Ph.D.”—her only identity in the on-line version—suggested that hospice nurses tell dying patients about matters like terminal sedation, starving themselves to death, etc.. I pointed out that much of what Schwartz advocates would exceed a nurse’s responsibilities.

I have since found out that Schwartz is actually deeply involved in the assisted suicide movement as the “Clinical Coordinator for Compassion & Choices in the Northeast and the Patient Support Coordinator for Compassion & Choices of New York. “ Yet, this important identifier was not included with the article—at least not as it appeared on-line.

Now that we know the ideological foundation for Schwartz’s opinion, readers have a far better ability to judge its sagacity.