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[阅读小分队] 【Native Speaker每日综合训练—44系列】【44-02】文史哲 Assisted Suicide

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发表于 2014-11-2 21:56:19 | 显示全部楼层 |阅读模式
内容:油桃F 编辑:油桃F

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Part I: Speaker

Assisted Suicide Advocate Uses Law To End His Life

Source: NPR
http://www.npr.org/2012/03/12/148459270/assisted-suicide-advocate-uses-law-to-end-his-life

[Rephrase 1, 3:38]

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 楼主| 发表于 2014-11-2 21:56:20 | 显示全部楼层
Part II: Speed


The danger of assisted suicide laws
BY Marilyn Golden | October 14, 2014

[Time 2]
My heart goes out to Brittany Maynard, who is dying of brain cancer and who wrote last week about her desire for what is often referred to as "death with dignity."

Yet while I have every sympathy for her situation, it is important to remember that for every case such as this, there are hundreds -- or thousands -- more people who could be significantly harmed if assisted suicide is legal.

The legalization of assisted suicide always appears acceptable when the focus is solely on an individual. But it is important to remember that doing so would have repercussions across all of society, and would put many people at risk of immense harm. After all, not every terminal prognosis is correct, and not everyone has a loving husband, family or support system.

As an advocate working on behalf of disability rights for 37 years, and as someone who uses a wheelchair, I am all too familiar with the explicit and implicit pressures faced by people living with chronic or serious disability or disease. But the reality is that legalizing assisted suicide is a deadly mix with the broken, profit-driven health care system we have in the United States.

At less than $300, assisted suicide is, to put it bluntly, the cheapest treatment for a terminal illness. This means that in places where assisted suicide is legal, coercion is not even necessary. If life-sustaining expensive treatment is denied or even merely delayed, patients will be steered toward assisted suicide, where it is legal.

This problem applies to government-funded health care as well.

In 2008, came the story that Barbara Wagner, a Springfield, Oregon, woman diagnosed with lung cancer and prescribed a chemotherapy drug by her personal physician, had reportedly received a letter from the Oregon Health Plan stating that her chemotherapy treatment would not be covered. She said she was told that instead, they would pay for, among other things, her assisted suicide.

"To say to someone: "We'll pay for you to die, but not for you to live" -- it's cruel," she said.

Another Oregon resident, 53-year-old Randy Stroup, was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Like Wagner, Stroup was reportedly denied approval of his prescribed chemotherapy treatment and instead offered coverage for assisted suicide.
[373 words]

[Time 3]
Meanwhile, where assisted suicide is legal, an heir or abusive caregiver may steer someone towards assisted suicide, witness the request, pick up the lethal dose, and even give the drug -- no witnesses are required at the death, so who would know? This can occur despite the fact that diagnoses of terminal illness are often wrong, leading people to give up on treatment and lose good years of their lives.

True, "safeguards" have been put in place where assisted suicide is legal. But in practical terms, they provide no protection. For example, people with a history of depression and suicide attempts have received the lethal drugs. Michael Freeland of Oregon reportedly had a 40-year history of significant depression, yet he received lethal drugs in Oregon.

These risks are simply not worth the price of assisted suicide.

Available data suggests that pain is rarely the reason why people choose assisted suicide. Instead, most people do so because they fear burdening their families or becoming disabled or dependent.

Anyone dying in discomfort that is not otherwise relievable, may legally today, in all 50 states, receive palliative sedation, wherein the patient is sedated to the point at which the discomfort is relieved while the dying process takes place peacefully. This means that today there is a legal solution to painful and uncomfortable deaths, one that does not raise the very serious problems of legalizing assisted suicide.

The debate about assisted suicide is not new, but voters and elected officials grow very wary of it when they learn the facts. Just this year alone, assisted suicide bills were rejected in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, and stalled in New Jersey, due to bipartisan, grassroots opposition from a broad coalition of groups spanning the political spectrum from left to right, including disability rights organizations, medical professionals and associations, palliative care specialists, hospice workers and faith-based organizations.

Assisted suicide is a unique issue that breaks down ideological boundaries and requires us to consider those potentially most vulnerable in our society.

All this means that we should, as a society, strive for better options to address the fear and uncertainty articulated by Brittany Maynard. But if assisted suicide is legal, some people's lives will be ended without their consent, through mistakes and abuse. No safeguards have ever been enacted or proposed that can properly prevent this outcome, one that can never be undone.

Ultimately, when looking at the bigger picture, and not just individual cases, one thing becomes clear: Any benefits from assisted suicide are simply not worth the real and significant risks of this dangerous public policy.
[431 words]

Source: CNN opinions
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/10/13/opinion/golden-assisted-suicide


Dignified Debate
BY  Lewis M. Cohen | Aug. 11, 2014

[Time 4]
Last month, a spellbinding 10-hour debate to legalize physician-assisted dying took place in Britain’s House of Lords. Since Americans are unfamiliar with this legislative body, it bears mention that most peers in the upper house of Parliament have been appointed for life for their experience in public service or for their outstanding level of achievement in a given field. Accordingly, many of the bills introduced are not shackled by political constraints, as is the case in the U.S. Congress, but instead address urgent social issues that warrant and receive thoughtful consideration.

Lord Falconer of Thoroton convened a committee to draft an aid-in-dying bill, HL 6, based on the 1997 Oregon Death with Dignity statute. The proposed U.K. bill would allow doctors to prescribe a lethal dose of oral barbiturate medications to terminally ill, mentally competent patients judged to have less than six months to live.

Three states in the United States have such laws (Oregon, Washington, and Vermont) and two others (Montana and New Mexico) are not criminalizing the practice, but many states have laws against assisted suicide with penalties for families or physicians of up to 10 years imprisonment. The House of Lords debate barely rated mention in the American news media. That may be because there is an almost impenetrable taboo in our country surrounding death-hastening decisions. We can learn a lot from the recent discussion in the United Kingdom.

In the lead-up to the debate, Lord Carey, the retired Archbishop of Canterbury, shocked his church by declaring he could no longer condone “needless suffering” and now supported legalization.

“If we truly love our neighbors as ourselves,” he explained,” how can we deny them the death we would wish for ourselves?”

The backlash was swift and predictable. The Bishop of Carlisle and the present Archbishop of Canterbury claimed that if the prohibition were to be lifted, there were “risks and dangers" that many thousands of vulnerable elderly and infirm individuals would be pressured to prematurely end their lives.

The bishop of Worcester, John Inge, then poignantly recounted during an interview the circumstances of his wife’s death from abdominal cancer on Easter Day.

“If assisted dying had been legal,” the bishop stated, “how tempting it would have been for me at that stage—or later, as the dreadful effects of chemo took their toll and I became more and more worn out with caring for my wife and two children and distressed at seeing her in such pain and discomfort—how tempting it would have been for me to have suggested to her that it would be ‘for the best’ for her to end it all there and then.”
[441 words]

[Time 5]
Just as the British public was reacting to these pre-debate sentiments, Desmond Tutu, one of the world's most highly respected moral leaders, declared he was backing Lord Falconer’s bill.

Writing in the Observer, the 82-year-old retired Anglican archbishop from South Africa said laws preventing people from being helped to end their lives are an affront to both them and their families. He had arrived at this position following the “self-delivery” (suicide) of a young, desperately ill South African man, Craig Schonegevel. Tutu also took the opportunity to condemn as “disgraceful” the treatment accorded to his friend, Nelson Mandela, who was kept alive through numerous painful hospitalizations and propped up for a photo shoot with visiting politicians shortly before his death at age 95.

"I have been fortunate to spend my life working for dignity for the living,” he wrote. “Now I wish to apply my mind to the issue of dignity for the dying. I revere the sanctity of life—but not at any cost."

This same opinion was unexpectedly echoed that week by Stephen Hawking during a BBC-TV broadcast. The famed physicist, who has a motor neuron disease, said through a speech-generating device, “If you have a terminal illness, and are in great pain, I think you should have the right to end your life. … It is discrimination against the disabled to deny them the right … that able-bodied people have.”

When the debate in Parliament finally ensued, Lord Falconer addressed the assembled: “My Lords, in the last stages of a terminal illness, there are people who wish to end their life rather than struggle for the last few months, weeks, days or hours. Often it is not the pain that motivates such a wish, but the loss of independence and dignity. … The current situation leaves the rich able to go to Switzerland [where assisted suicide is legal], the majority reliant on amateur assistance, the compassionate treated like criminals and no safeguards in respect of undue pressure.”
[330 words]

[Time 6]
As his colleagues took turns speaking, their voices sometimes quivered with age and the anguish of conviction. Both thoughtful and emotional arguments volleyed back and forth in the oak-paneled chamber.

Baroness Nicholson warned that the National Health Service would be transformed into the “National Death Service,” and doctors would become “executioners.”
Lord Avebury said, “As a Buddhist, I recognize that this Bill contravenes fundamental Buddhist beliefs in the inviolability of human life, but there is also the Buddhist principle of compassion, which I think applies in the extreme circumstances of distressing terminal illness.”

Baroness Campbell spoke from her wheelchair with the aid of artificial respiration. “This bill is about me,” she said. “I did not ask for it and do not want it but it is about me nevertheless … [It] gives no comfort to me. It frightens me, because in periods of greatest difficulty, I know I might be tempted to use it.”

Lord Harris optimistically announced, “[The Bill’s] passing is as clear a mark of social progress as this week’s Church of England decision allowing the appointment of female bishops and the 2013 legalization of equal marriage.”

Lord Tebbit cautioned, “This bill is a breeding ground for vultures, individual and corporate. It creates too much financial incentive for the taking of life.”

During the debate in the House of Lords, a record number of members addressed the chamber—62 peers spoke up in opposition and 65 in support. While Lord Falconer’s bill is unlikely to become law during this session of Parliament, it has now officially passed the second reading and is moving to the committee stage. There it will be scrutinized, amendments proposed, a report issued, and it will eventually move to a third reading before possible passage. Whatever the bill’s fate, the debate has both raised awareness and educated the public about an increasingly crucial issue.

Paradoxically, aid in dying has more to do with living than with dying. It is most relevant in affluent countries like the United Kingdom and United States where many citizens are likely to die slowly of the infirmities of age and progressive illnesses rather than suddenly of violence and accidents. The debate in the House of Lords was about—and conducted by—people who have been fortunate to be able to make choices throughout their lives. The result is, perhaps ironically, something that Congress seems unable to achieve these days: an actual dialogue that has the potential to transform rancor into the sort of respectful disagreement and mutual sympathy essential to a successful democracy. One can but hope every country—including the United States—will achieve a national conversation about how we want to die, and this can occur with the wisdom, honesty, style, and eloquence that were on display in London.
[462 words]

Source: Slate
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2014/08/assisted_suicide_debate_in_united_kingdom_house_of_lords_on_death_with_dignity.html
 楼主| 发表于 2014-11-2 21:56:21 | 显示全部楼层
Part III: Obstacle


Brittany Maynard’s Hope for a Better Death
By Rebecca Mead | October 31, 2014

[Paraphrase 7]
When Brittany Maynard’s parents decided what to call their infant daughter, in 1984, they were in the vanguard of a trend: that year, she was one of just more than seventy-six hundred American girls given that name, almost ten times the total five years earlier. By 1989, the number of Brittanys had peaked, at almost thirty-eight thousand, only to dwindle back down to the hundreds today. There aren’t many little-girl Brittanys now, and there are even fewer old ones. If you’re called Brittany, you are almost certainly an American woman in your twenties, doing the things that American women who are in their twenties do: studying, working your first grownup job, nurturing your ambitions. Perhaps you are thinking about marriage. (The average age of marriage for a woman in the United States is twenty-seven.) You may be contemplating starting a family, or have nascent hopes for the young family you have already begun. Or you may be enumerating the things you’d like to accomplish before you embark upon that path, or feel far from contemplating commitment of any kind. You are at the outset of your adult life, when you seem to yourself, if not invulnerable, then at least resilient. Illness, let alone mortality, is mostly a concern for older people. (The average life expectancy for an American woman is eighty-one.) With adolescence so recently shucked off, your independence scintillates. Your future can seem so boundless that time is yours for the using, or wasting, as you choose.

Brittany Maynard, who was given a diagnosis of inoperable brain cancer earlier this year, with the direst of prognoses—only six months to live, with a disease that will cause progressively more pain and disability—has a considerably more bounded future. In accordance with her rights as a newly minted resident of the state of Oregon, to which she moved from California after her diagnosis, Maynard has been supplied by her physician with drugs that will enable her to end her own life at a time of her choosing. (Physician-assisted suicide is legal only in a handful of states; Oregon was the first to introduce it, in 1997.) She has also made public her quest to achieve “death with dignity”—a term that advocates for the cause prefer over “suicide,” with its connotations of violence and self-destruction. Maynard, who trained as a teacher before her illness, has submitted to interviews with television shows and popular magazines—she was on the cover of People this week—to make the case that, given the severity of her cancer, she should be free to choose the moment and manner of her death. She has used her platform to argue that the option available to her should be available to all Americans with terminal, imminent diagnoses, regardless of their place of residence.

Maynard is not the first terminally ill cancer patient to make this most private of decisions a matter of public discussion, but the combination of her poise, her lucidity, and her youth have amplified her voice. Since a Web site to publicize her case was launched, three weeks ago, more than nine million people have watched a video in which she describes receiving the diagnosis last January. The interview is intercut with photographs of Maynard from her wedding, which took place in the fall of 2012: she and her husband, Dan Diaz, a market researcher, are pictured outdoors, beneath wide-boughed trees, Maynard lovely in a white gown. She articulates her intentions with clarity and even a flash of humor: “I don’t wake up every day and look at it,” she says of the secobarbital she has been prescribed. “But it’s in a safe spot, and I know that it’s there when I need it.” As she describes her plans to die in her own bedroom, surrounded by her closest family and with her favorite music playing, the video cuts to a pretty room with a four-poster bed under a window, a patch of sunlight falling upon the coverlet. It could be an image from the last pages of her wedding album.

Earlier this month, it was reported that Maynard had set November 1st as the intended date of her demise, but more recently she has said that the date was a target she hopes to reach, not a deadline she has set for herself. Already experiencing seizures, memory loss, and acute headaches, she has said that she prefers not to wait until she’s been robbed of more of her faculties. Her mother, Debbie Ziegler, told a television interviewer that it would “be an honor” to feed and diaper Maynard in her final days, but said that the decision should be her daughter’s. In a second video, released this week, Maynard tearfully states her preference to end her life before she is reduced to dependency. “The worst thing that could happen to me is that I wait too long because I’m trying to seize each day, but that I somehow have my autonomy taken away from me by my disease,” she says.

Maynard’s decision has been the occasion for a renewed discussion about physician-assisted suicide. Her story has been invoked as a demonstration of the failure of the American health-care system, and as an illustration of the public’s loss of trust that the treatment we receive at the end of life will be as compassionate and as caring as we would hope. Other observers have questioned her choice, some on the grounds of religious faith. (Whatever her private convictions may be, Maynard’s video statements have been resolutely secular.) One Catholic seminarian, Philip Johnson, urged Maynard to reconsider, and wrote of his own diagnosis with brain cancer, “My life means something to me, to God, and to my family and friends, and barring a miraculous recovery, it will continue to mean something long after I am paralyzed in a hospice bed. My family and friends love me for who I am, not just for the personality traits that will slowly slip away if this tumor progresses and takes my life.”

Since Oregon’s Death with Dignity law was passed, at least seven hundred and fifty terminally ill residents, the vast majority of them with cancer, have died with a physician’s assistance. The median age of those who have died under the terms of the law is seventy-one. (Several hundred more Oregonians have requested, but ultimately not used, the prescription.) In Maynard’s case, this last exertion of control—the desire to set the scene for her death—is a moving manifestation of adult autonomy only very recently won, all the more poignant for the way in which it parallels Maynard’s recent, more generationally predictable incarnation as a bride. The scene she envisages for her death adheres to familiar tropes no less than do the wedding photos on her Web site: she wants to be at home, among loved ones, with minimal pain and the chance to say goodbye. Like a wedding photo, this scene only hints at the depths of love and commitment it strives to represent. It is inadequate to the enormity of grief it must contain. It is an ideal projection, the best conceivable version of a moment beyond imagining. It is the scene that many of us would wish for ourselves and for our loved ones, were we to have a say in the matter.

According to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about a third of all Americans die in the hospital, but this number has been declining. While “death with dignity” campaigns make for arresting headlines, quieter campaigns for better palliative care are also challenging the use of prolonged medical interventions at the end of life. We have become accustomed to thinking of a wedding as an exercise in contrived perfection; for many of us, a wedding is the only opportunity we have to set the stage for an important transitional moment in our lives, and to enact that ritual in the manner we choose. But, increasingly, it seems likely that more of us will have the right and the responsibility to consider what we hope for, and how to render, our life’s consummation.
[1354 words]

Source: The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/brittany-maynard-aspiration-better-death
发表于 2014-11-2 21:58:45 | 显示全部楼层
谢谢油桃~很好的文章,引发思考~~
time2: The author thinks it is dangerous to let assisted suicide be legal. There are cases that healthcare providers do
       not want to pay for living treatment but for assisted suicide and this sounds cruel.
time3: The author thinks that when looks at the bigger picture, any benefits from assisted suicide are simply not worth
       the real and significant risks of this dangerous public policy.
time4: A spellbinding 10-hour debate to legalize physician-assisted dying took place in Britain's House of Lords. Lord
       Carey said he would no longer condone "needless suffering" while the bishop of Worcester the legalization would
       make people more tempt to let their families with terminal disease end their life.
time5: Nelson Mandela and Stephen Hawking both think that people with significant pain have the right to choose to end
       their life and die with dignity.
time6: Some people think that the legalization of assisted suicide would turn the National Health Service into the "National
       Death Service" and the doctors would become "executioners". The author thinks that it is expected that every country
       will achieve a national conversation about how we want to die.
发表于 2014-11-3 07:15:36 | 显示全部楼层
Speaker
G was the first doctor to help pass the Act of Death with dignity and he wanted to use the law to choose his way of termination when he was diagosed as rare brain disease.
He received 6-months prognosis in order to able to use the law and then he ended his life with assisted suicide,which seems te be rejected as a term in the law
Lee worked with G and helped the pass of this law and it is legal in Washington and in M


Obstacle: 6'21''
M was planning her future as well as her marriage as an ordinary young, but she was diagnozed cancer and she initiated a campaign called" death with dignity" that means you can choose to suiside at your will.
She thought patients should allowed to choose to die at their preferential place rather than hospital bed,and she at her deadline period spreaded her feeling to the world.
Finally the Death with Dignity law was passed in Oregon allowing people choose their ways to die with lovers around them.
发表于 2014-11-3 09:19:37 | 显示全部楼层
T2        373        144        155.42         it may cause trouble to legalize the assisted suicide
T3        431        184        140.54         the risks which assisted suicide brings about are not worth the price of assisted suicide such as safeguards which can ensure people's lives to end with their consent.  the benifits are not worth the risks of this dangerous public policy.
T4        441        181        146.19         an animated debate to legalize assisted suicide took place in the uk and there were lot of differences which the us can learn.  and backlash was swift and predictable.
T5        330        118        167.80         some celebrities are backing the bill.
T6        462        183        151.48         aid in dying is more relevant in affluent countries
OB        1354        452        179.73         maynard chose to have a better death. her story demonstrated the failure of the american health-care system and illustrated the public's loss of trust . we have the right and the responsibility to consider what we hope for.
发表于 2014-11-3 09:38:40 | 显示全部楼层
Speakers Dr. Goodwin was the one of the first physicians to voice out the support the death and dignity Act and used the Oregon's law to end his life. he was diagnosed rare Brain disease. when he received the prescription about his disease progress, he decided to use the law to end his life, even though he still enjoyed his life. He got the 6 month prognosis which made the patient eligible to use the law, and he dead on Sunday. More than 500 people use the Oregon’s law to end their own life. And those who assist them think this give them great service. They can choose different kind of death. This law is effective in Washington and Montana, will become effective in Massachusetts. Dr. G said that having the rights to control his death allowed him not face the fear before his death.
Speed
T2r:02:01 even though the assist suicide gives people death with dignity, it still bring people at a risk of immense harm. Not everyone has loving family. Another disadvantage of assisted suicide is mixed with profit driven health care. The drug to cure the cancers of one patients were not covered by government owned heath care, but if she want to choose assisted suicide. The health care would covet that. This is cruel and ironic.
T3: 02:40 In practical term, "safeguard" put in place where assist suicide is legal provide no pretection on patients. Ppeople may choose assist suicide not because of painful but other reasons. People's life should not be the price of wrongly public policy.
发表于 2014-11-3 10:41:32 | 显示全部楼层
1 A 02:17
2 A 02:30
3 A 02:37
4 A 01:50
5 A 02:47
6 A 08:02
the case of a asisted death. how is it happened, what society resoponded to the case, the future effects
发表于 2014-11-3 11:00:13 | 显示全部楼层
T2 1'49'92
T3 2'28'25
T4 2'36'64
T5 1'35'67
T6 2'35'24
Obstacle:10'43'71
1.Brittany girl-intro of Brittany Maynard has brain cancer-wants to death with dignity
2.intreview and report of Maynard,she express her opinion to the public,make the private of decisions a matter if public discussion.
3.her story caused renewed discussion about physician assisted suicide.(background:since the law passed, an amout of people want to dead with dignity,but the case of M helps to move the manifestation of adult autonomy)
4.Now more and more people chose to death with diginity ,it calls for the consideration of our life’s consummation(what and how)
发表于 2014-11-3 11:48:10 | 显示全部楼层
油桃F 发表于 2014-11-2 21:56
Part II: Speed

The danger of assisted suicide laws

2,2‘28
3,2’55
4,2‘43
5,2’08
6,3‘11
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