Assisted Suicide in New Mother Jones Article.

Liliana Segura asks today at Mother Jones, "Do You Want the Right to Kill Yourself?" In the article she covers the controversy surrounding the world's new "Dr. Death," Dr. Philip Nitschke.

She does a fine job of summarizing the basic outline of the issue of assisted suicide in the US (though she does not include Montana as the third state where death with dignity is legal or mention the new lawsuit in Connecticut) and how it overlaps with hospice, religion, and suicide. An excerpt:

That present question, more than 15 years later, is as relevant as ever. Yet, as we have seen all too clearly in the past several weeks, in the United States, even the most superficial changes in our for-profit health care system have proved polarizing beyond reason; a meaningful attempt to address the fraught topic of end-of-life care seems nearly impossible.

With another round of controversy over the "right to die" on the horizon, hysteria over so-called death panels must be abandoned in favor of a less distorted, more empathetic discussion over the right to health care—in all its forms.