Showing posts with label John Kelly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Kelly. Show all posts

Thursday, January 25, 2024

John Kelly's Testimony Opposing Assisted Suicide in Minnesota

There is no way to contain eligibility to a narrow set of people. Especially when thousands of disabled Americans now live with conditions that in some states are seen as “worse than death.” Anorexia nervosa and diabetes can now qualify as terminal conditions. Once death is accepted as a positive outcome of medical care, it inevitably gets offered to more and more people.

The problem for us disabled people is that we are already treated badly in the medical system. As medicine has focused increasingly on patient “quality-of-life” as a barometer of life-worthiness, death has been re-characterized as a benefit to an ill or disabled individual. Most physicians (82%,  a 2020 Harvard study found) view our “quality-of-life” as worse than non-disabled people.

Friday, June 12, 2020

Massachusetts: Assisted Suicide Bill Timing "Wrong"

To view full press release on Not Dead Yet, click here.                   


John Kelly
Second Thoughts Massachusetts issues the following statement in opposition to the favorable report given by the state legislature’s Joint Committee on Public Health to Bill S. 2745, legislation that would legalize assisted suicide in Massachusetts.
Assisted suicide legislation sends a message of ‘better dead than disabled’ while completely immunizing doctors, heirs, and caregivers who can encourage or even engineer a person’s death without fear of prosecution,” said Second Thoughts Director John B. Kelly.

Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Disability group welcomes ruling against right to assisted suicide in Mass.

.- Second Thoughts Massachusetts, a disability rights group, has praised a recent ruling that there is not a right to assisted suicide in the state's law or its constitution.
In a decision dated Dec. 31, 2019, Justice Mary Ames of the Suffolk Superior Court ruled that physicians who prescribe lethal medication for assisted suicide in Massachusetts can be prosecuted for involuntary manslaughter, but that physicians may provide information and advice on assisted suicide to terminally ill, competent adults.
“We are gratified that the court reaffirmed the law against assisted suicide, and referred the matter to the legislature where lawmaking belongs. Disability rights advocates will continue to press the legislature that assisted suicide is just too dangerous,” John Kelly, director of Second Thoughts, commented Jan. 13.