Group warns agains living wills: Standard form assumes you want to be starved or dehydrated to death

Nurses, hospital workers...I think they just want to see you die, They are pretty immune to death, and probably figure most people are just gonna kick off anyways..... plus they do see alot of suffering.

Yours just happened to be the last bizarre statement on the thread as I read down. When you say something silly like that I can tell you that you have been warped by Terri hysteria that is more emotional than logical.

There is no 'culture of death'. There is no agenda by hospital and hospice workers to just make sure that more people die and soon. We are rather just in a period in medicine where people can be kept alive a long time but not always cured, when we can delay the death of a patient who is no longer even aware they are alive.

I can only assume many here are naive to death and dying, have not been through it with loved ones. I have been through more losses than most people my age, I think. I lost my mom, grandparents, and almost all my aunts and uncles to terminal disease. Most had the fortune to know they were going to die and to give their wishes serious thought. And most did not want to prolong the suffering of everyone when there was no hope of recovery. To see my mother nearly lifeless in her final stages, alive but unable to wake due to morphine that kept her from suffering immeasurable pain from her cancer... No one should want to prolong that. And the people who treated her, ensured her comfort and helped us know what to expect as she died were Godsends. Make no mistake about that.

I have a feeling that the Catholic Church, as well as other truly pro-life denominations and organizations have standardized forms available at no cost that have been reviewed on a state-by-state basis. As far as legal aid goes, there are also legal aid groups that are funded by churches and they may be a good source Keepin mind that it is unethical for an attorney to willingly mislead any client (even if they haven't paid a penny), very few will risk their law license just to follow an agenda. A lot of the work for legal aid organizations is done as pro bono work by large law firms and they are very competent lawyers. Also, I have known a number of lawyers who did legal aid and for the most part their overwhelming concern was in making sure the impoverished didn't get screwed, their agenda is usually anti-big business or anti-death penalty, rather than anything else. I would not trust any of the pre-printed forms that hospitals have, because they almost certainly are written to protect the hospital above all else.

The problem (not with the post, with the original article) is that it assumes I (and all Californians) am too stupid to see all the blank lines on the form to write in my exact wishes. Also, just before the quoted portion of the form, it reads: If you fill out this part of the form, you may strike any wording you do not want.

Campaign for Children and Families is not being fully truthful here.

I am a lawyer, have prepared a number of living wills, and my eyes have been opened. I would never want one of the ones I've prepared for others. Yikes! Beware, they're intended to make it easy to end your life, not keep you alive until your natural time has come.

Here is a link to a Catholic Advanced Medical Directive that meets the requirements of Virginia.
http://www.arlingtondiocese.org/offices/family/rl-education.html#AMD

My beloved and I each have those and we STILL made sure others knew we didn't want to be starved or dehydrated (sp?) to death.

Mine knows that, given the choice of living out this life with little or no cognitive abilities, I'd sooner be in glory. So in that case, please starve and dehydrate me. Morphine might be nice, too.

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