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Recent Star Tribune stories profiling people asking Minnesota legislators to pass physician-assisted suicide are sincere and heartfelt. But rather than making the case for it, their stories instead tell us what we should do under current law to better help individuals facing the end of their life with a path toward a truly compassionate and dignified end. Under current law, we have the right to a legally binding end-of-life directive, a power of attorney/medical decisionmaking directive, the right to hospice and palliative care, and the right to direct our own care. If these rights were better known and executed, physician-assisted suicide would not even be a consideration.
Also, legislators should know that the Minnesota bill lacks the “safeguard” of a legitimate waiting period and allows nurse practitioners to prescribe lethal drugs, even though Medicare prohibits them from qualifying patients for hospice, which is also based on a six-month prognosis. All doctors and APRNs are required to offer physician-assisted suicide as a treatment option as part of a new standard of care, which some patients may feel is coercive.
I say “no, thank you” to physician-assisted suicide, and so should our legislators. Let’s enact laws that help us better care for one another.
Nancy Utoft, Woodbury
The writer is the president of the Minnesota Alliance for Ethical Healthcare.
BORDER POLICY
GOP got all it asked for, and said no
The differences in approach between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump on our southern border couldn’t be more clear (“Biden, Trump take battle to the border,” March 1). Biden spoke of working together, Republicans and Democrats, to pass the bipartisan border security bill that has been hammered out in the Senate.