Kristin Kennell argues for Initiative 1000 from a number of mistaken viewpoints (Auburn Reporter, Oct. 1).

There is no dignity in suicide, only a legacy of family shame and bystander pity over an act that ends all hope. The initiative requires that the victim be “diagnosed” as terminally ill within some number of months, notwithstanding medicine’s basic inability to make such quantitative determinations.

There are cases of those deemed terminally ill within a short horizon, yet lived for years afterwards. To enable suicide in the face of such potential error is irresponsible, if not monstrous.

She points to the Oregon law as a good example – as though a law producing 300 suicides a year is something to be proud of.

Finally, she offers the plausible but false argument that the purpose of all this suicide is to end physical pain. Pain can be addressed by appropriate medicine or surgical intervention. Just as those who suffer from an excruciating toothache do not consider suicide, neither should mere pain be a basis for taking one’s life. The fact is that most of those who seek medical suicide do so on the basis of feeling unwanted or useless, or a burden to family.

You need not be mentally deficient in order to be old and vulnerable, and easily nudged into self-extinction by a family and social environment that clearly wants no more of you. The answer is for us to be more merciful in life, rather than in death.

I-1000 is a step toward normalization of clinical murder, as if we were livestock. It corrupts medicine by causing doctors to violate their Hippocratic Oath (“do no harm”) and also by causing them to perjure themselves to record a false cause of death.

– Michael J. Dunn