A SILLY BILL IN OHIO by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Mar 7, 1906

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 32, No. 10.

"A SILLY BILL IN OHIO."

By Editor

THIS is what our esteemed contemporary, the Medical Record, calls the measure now before the Ohio Legislature, to kill a person who is suffering; and it is just about what we would expect the Record to say:

An old man with a stomach ache will be in a perilous state in Ohio if Miss Anna S. Hall and Representative Hunt of Cincinnati have their way. The latter, presumably at the instance of the former, has introduced a bill into the Ohio House of Representatives, making it lawful "to kill a person suffering from intense pain and for whose recovery there is no hope." Every one who has experienced it will fully admit that the pain of a stomach ache may be intense, and no one will deny that there is no hope of recovery from old age. It is true, the bill provides an imaginary safeguard in that the patient's consent must first be obtained by some one who is not a relative or a presumptive heir; but a man, or a woman, with a pain legally defined as intense, may temporarily be non compos and weakly answer in the affirmative—and then the game is up. It is hardly possible to treat this question seriously; for it is too hideous to be regarded as anything but a grim joke.

It is within the knowledge of almost every one that some relative or friend, now living, has been believed, and even declared by the physician in attendance, to be beyond the hope of recovery. Consumptives, who once were gasping for breath and were momentarily expected to yield up their last sigh, are to-day leading an active and useful life; persons suffering from a tumor, pronounced cancerous and incurable by a council of physicians, have recovered and are carrying on their work with comfort to themselves and cheer to their families; the same is true of innumerable others who have been condemned to speedy dissolution and are yet alive to shame their doctors and rejoice their loved ones. "While there is life there is hope" is a saying so true that to deny it is an absurdity. There is a power in therapeutics, and a still greater power in the recuperative forces of nature, which is inane to ignore.

The Ohio legislators failed to reject this bill, when a motion to that effect was made, by a vote of 79 to 23, but we refuse to believe that this is a measure of the intelligence of this body of Solons. The seventy-nine may have thought it would be well to have some discussion on the subject before the final rejection of this criminal suggestion, in order to instruct fool legislators in other states who might be contemplating a similar move, or they may have had some other motive; but that seventy-nine out of 102 men in any assembly outside of a lunatic asylum can seriously support this bill, which one sane member called "an insult to the intelligence of the House," passes the bounds of credulity. The thing is a silly joke, and we are unable to regard it as anything else.