Marcia Angell Quotes

Patients who are being kept alive by technology and want to end their lives already have a recognized constitutional right to stop any and all medical interventions, from respirators to antibiotics. They do not need physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia.

The proposed Health Care Reform bill will put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.

Death deserves dignity.

I'm trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death.

Illness and death are not optional. Patients have a right to determine how they approach them.

I work with a group called Compassion & Choices in California. It's attempting to get death with dignity legalised in California, the idea being that so goes California, so goes the rest of the U.S., at least.

My mother begged doctors to end her life. She was beyond the physical ability to swallow enough of the weak morphine pills she had around her. When she knew she was dying I promised to make sure she could go at a time of her choosing, but it was impossible. I couldn't help.

It's silly to keep people alive who have a terrible disease.

If I had terminal cancer, I had a few weeks to live, I was in tremendous amount of pain - if they just effectively wanted to turn off the switch and legalise that by legalising euthanasia, I'd want that.

No one wants to live in a wheelchair unable to talk, only winking once for yes and twice for no. It's perfectly reasonable that there will come a point where the balance of judgment of life over death swings the other way.

Death is not treatment, even if it's medically facilitated.

Yes, we need euthanasia, for certain cases where people are in comas or too immobile to even press a button.

I hope that when the time comes, I am treated with compassion and allowed to pass on to the next phase of life's journey in the manner of my choice.

We could move catalog, if he'd only die quicker.

In the event that my illness worsens, I want to have a guarantee that I can die in a dignified manner. Nowhere in the bible does it say that a person has to stick it out to the decreed end. No one tells us what "decreed" means.

Many, if not most, Americans can imagine a fate worse than death, and it is a seemingly interminable process of dying. For them, it is frightening that politicians can find ways to interject themselves into this sad process.

A lot of money is spent trying to keep people alive who don't necessarily want to be alive.

When I came to this country in 1958, to be a dying patient in a medical hospital was a nightmare. You were put in the last room, furthest away from the nurses' station. You were full of pain, but they wouldn't give you morphine. Nobody told you that you were full of cancer and that it was understandable that you had pain and needed medication.

Hospice is such a tremendous thing. Patients seem to reach an inner peace.

When people are dying, bureaucracy should be thrown out of the water.

My father was in terrible pain towards the end because of his bed sores, and he did go into hospice, and I think that was better in some ways. You know, I think his death was peaceful, and it was all right. He was just in terrible pain.

I know that there are people who believe that if they get to the stage where life is absolutely intolerable because of pain and indignity... they would like to end their life before nature intended, and we think they should have the choice to do so.

People make these comments all the time. They talk about this with their loved ones every day. People's feedings - tube feedings - are stopped across this country every day.

I think those who have a terminal illness and are in great pain should have the right to choose to end their own life, and those that help them should be free from prosecution.

People want the right to die at a time of their own choosing. Too many families have watched helplessly as a relative dies slowly, longing for death.