1NC

1NC
Legalization of PAS is an affirmation of the act by official state
sanction within regulation
Yuill 13
Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Sunderland; author, Assisted Suicide: The Liberal Humanist
Case Against Legalization) Kevin https://kevinyuill.wordpress.com/tag/assisted-suicide/

the only real difference between assisted dying

and assisted suicide is that the former has been officially sanctioned
by doctors and by legality . Someone in Oregon with, according to
two doctors, five months left to live who ingests poison is, according to
Second, and much more importantly,

Compassion and Choices, Dignity in Dying, other proponents of a change in the law and, since 2006, the Oregon Department of

is an assisted death. Someone who is dying but has seven

months to live who ingests the same poison is, according to the
same sources, an assisted suicide. The change in terminology, then, is
not simply political correctness but an indication of a new role that
proponents envisage for doctors. Importantly, the rejection of the term
suicide implies that the moral taint of suicide in particular circumstances that are
determined by officials, lawmakers and doctors is to be removed . The
Human Services,

action of taking ones life is no different in the two scenarios. But the former is given official imprimatur and is therefore an assisted death (good) instead
of a suicide (bad). Such a change has important implications. The obvious one is that, as priests and other religious officials have departed the deathbed
scene, their place has been filled by doctors. For it would be difficult to deny that, in the scenarios outlined in the introduction, doctors play a spiritual role
only. As we shall explore in future chapters, suicide may be accomplished without the aid of official medicine so they play only an officiating role whereby
they dispense deadly drugs that the patient might have bought herself, like a priest placing wafers on the tongues of his flock. The fact that the doctor
gives the poison ritualizes the action within a set of bureaucratic guidelines. The implication for the patient, similarly, is validation of their suffering. In the
past, religious figures comforted the dying by rationalizing suffering as part of Gods plan. Now, should assisted suicide be institutionalized, physicians will
provide an end to depression and mental suffering (as we shall see, physical suffering plays very little role in requests for assisted suicide) by offering
death as a medical treatment. The change in terminology reflects an important shift away from moral responsibility for the act. Whereas the right to die,
self-determination and assisted suicide all imply that the individual involved takes full responsibility for the act, assignation of moral responsibility for
assisted dying is more diffuse. Importantly, such an apparently facile change lumps together very different things in moral terms killing another person
and suicide. Suppose I make a pact with my friend that, should I ever support a soccer team other than Arsenal, he should kill me and, twenty years later,
I arrive to meet him with a Tottenham Hotspur shirt and he kills me. Alternately, suppose I agreed, upon meeting him with the offending shirt, that I should
be killed for my lack of loyalty and for now supporting such a ridiculous football team. Suppose I then asked him for his gun and shot myself. These two
very different acts might be construed as assisted dying (to satisfy Dignity in Dying criteria, let us also say that, at the time, I had less than six months to
live), though, in a court of law, the former would be murder and the latter suicide. Though the effect would be the same for me (and, being dead, the
question of my responsibility moot) and though my friend might bear some responsibility even if I pulled the trigger, the two acts are profoundly different
for him. Yet the concept of assisted dying essentially equates these two different acts. In fact, as we shall discuss in Chapter 6, negating moral

courts, where individuals are tried to determine the

degree of their responsibility for a crime, are less appropriate than
professional regulatory tribunals, where the question becomes
whether or not a set of regulations has been followed properly.
Rather than self-determining actors who choose our own fates, we
responsibility means that

become points on an increasingly complex flow chart, requiring a huge apparatus of bureaucratic experts. If we accept Dignity in
Dyings suggestion that assisted dying involves only those who are considered to be dying, an essentially philosophical question is
determined by a professional regulatory body. There is little agreement on this issue even between advocates. Oregons and
Washingtons legislation (and that contained in proposed UK legislation) define the dying as those with a terminal illness and six
months to live whereas the UK Commission on Assisted Dying recommended that the subject be terminally ill and have 12 months
or less to live. If the phrase suffering unbearably is employed as it was in the proposed UK legislation, how will that be determined?
Again,

there is little clarity and great scope for regulations at every

step of the process .[18] The assisted suicide legislation and proposed legislation has created a new identity in the dying. But
the division between the dying whether they have six or 12 months to live and the rest of us is false. Who is not dying one day at a time? We are all
terminal, and the worth of our lives should not be crudely measured by the time we have left. Nor is dying a medical act; long before any medical
intervention occurred, people were dying without any intervention at all. As Daniel Callahan has noted, there is now a tendency to view death as
something that is done to us rather than something that occurs, as if death were now our fault, the result of human choices, not the independent
workings of nature. As the old joke has it, life itself is a sexually transmitted disease that is always fatal. The difference between someone with less than
six months to live and someone with many years is quantitative rather than qualitative. The dying as a category are, in actuality, those who have little
time left or, more controversially, as we shall explore in the next chapter, the elderly.[19] Such a term also obscures the historically different motivations

behind the campaign. Autonomy, in the classical sense, implies the freedom to terminate ones own life with no intrusion by the state or anyone else.
Compassion might (mistakenly) motivate people to support a campaign for the dying to be put out of their misery. As expressed in the example above, if
we support legalization of assisted dying, either we support selective suicides or selective killings. As we shall see in the next chapter, the movement for
assisted dying builds upon distrust of medical personnel; none of the campaigns in the English-speaking world call for more power for doctors. As
Professor Ray Tallis, prominent patron of the English proponent of a change in the law Dignity in Dying, notes, It is one of the fundamental principles of
medicine that you should be allowed to determine what is in your own best interest when you are of sound mind. Nobody elses views should be able to
over-ride this right.[20] Yet the voices of doctors, should assisted suicide be institutionalized, will, as we will see in Chapter 6, will be the loudest in these
decisions. Criticisms of this re-branding of suicide are not all from the anti-assisted suicide side. Such seasoned advocates of assisted suicide/dying as
Derek Humphry have also questioned it. Reacting to news that the Oregon Department of Human Services chose in 2006 to replace references to assisted
suicide with assisted dying, Humphrey noted: To wrap up our support for physician-assisted suicide in fancy language invites our critics to say that we
are trying to change the law covertly and that we are ashamed of being frank about what we really want, neither of which is true. The Commission on
Dying also refused to jettison the term assisted suicide, referring to assisted dying as both assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia.[21 ]

The

real issue at the heart of the debate one which is obscured by the
term assisted dying is suicide, not dying. The question at the
heart of this debate is whether we wish to pre-approve suicide in
certain circumstances .

Should means immediate

Summer 94
(Justice, Oklahoma Supreme Court, Kelsey v. Dollarsaver Food Warehouse of Durant,
http://www.oscn.net/applications/oscn/DeliverDocument.asp?CiteID=20287#marker3fn14)

The legal question to be resolved by the court is whether the word

"should"13 in the May 18 order connotes futurity or may be deemed
a ruling in praesenti.14 The answer to this query is not to be divined
from rules of grammar;15 it must be governed by the age-old
practice culture of legal professionals and its immemorial language usage. To determine if the
omission (from the critical May 18 entry) of the turgid phrase, "and the same hereby is", (1) makes it an in futuro ruling - i.e., an
expression of what the judge will or would do at a later stage - or (2) constitutes an in in praesenti resolution of a disputed law issue,
the trial judge's intent must be garnered from the four corners of the entire record.16 Nisi prius orders should be so construed as to
give effect to every words and every part of the text, with a view to carrying out the evident intent of the judge's direction.17 The

The actual meaning intended by the

document's signatory should be derived from the context in which
the phrase to be interpreted is used.18 When applied to the May 18 memorial, these told canons
impel my conclusion that the judge doubtless intended his ruling as an in
praesenti resolution of Dollarsaver's quest for judgment n.o.v. Approval of all counsel plainly appears on the face
order's language ought not to be considered abstractly.

of the critical May 18 entry which is [885 P.2d 1358] signed by the judge.19 True minutes20 of a court neither call for nor bear the
approval of the parties' counsel nor the judge's signature. To reject out of hand the view that in this context "should" is impliedly
followed by the customary, "and the same hereby is", makes the court once again revert to medieval notions of ritualistic formalism
now so thoroughly condemned in national jurisprudence and long abandoned by the statutory policy of this State. IV CONCLUSION
Nisi prius judgments and orders should be construed in a manner which gives effect and meaning to the complete substance of the
memorial. When a judge-signed direction is capable of two interpretations, one of which would make it a valid part of the record
proper and the other would render it a meaningless exercise in futility, the adoption of the former interpretation is this court's due. A
rule - that on direct appeal views as fatal to the order's efficacy the mere omission from the journal entry of a long and customarily
implied phrase, i.e., "and the same hereby is" - is soon likely to drift into the body of principles which govern the facial validity of
judgments. This development would make judicial acts acutely vulnerable to collateral attack for the most trivial of reasons and tend
to undermine the stability of titles or other adjudicated rights. It is obvious the trial judge intended his May 18 memorial to be an in
praesenti order overruling Dollarsaver's motion for judgment n.o.v. It is hence that memorial, and not the later June 2 entry, which
triggered appeal time in this case. Because the petition. in error was not filed within 30 days of May 18, the appeal is untimely. I
would hence sustain the appellee's motion to dismiss.21 Footnotes: 1 The pertinent terms of the memorial of May 18, 1993 are: IN
THE DISTRICT COURT OF BRYAN COUNTY, STATE OF OKLAHOMA COURT MINUTE 5/18/93 No. C-91-223 After having heard and
considered arguments of counsel in support of and in opposition to the motions of the Defendant for judgment N.O.V. and a new
trial, the Court finds that the motions should be overruled. Approved as to form: /s/ Ken Rainbolt /s/ Austin R. Deaton, Jr. /s/ Don
Michael Haggerty /s/ Rocky L. Powers Judge 2 The turgid phrase - "should be and the same hereby is" - is a tautological absurdity.

should" is synonymous with ought or must and is in itself

sufficient to effect an inpraesenti ruling - one that is couched in "a
present indicative synonymous with ought."
This is so because "

See infra note 15. 3 Carter v. Carter, Okl., 783 P.2d 969, 970 (1989); Horizons, Inc. v. Keo Leasing Co., Okl.,

681 P.2d 757, 759 (1984); Amarex, Inc. v. Baker, Okl., 655 P.2d 1040, 1043 (1983); Knell v. Burnes, Okl., 645 P.2d 471, 473 (1982); Prock v. District Court of Pittsburgh County, Okl., 630 P.2d 772, 775 (1981); Harry v. Hertzler, 185 Okl. 151, 90 P.2d 656, 659 (1939); Ginn v. Knight, 106 Okl. 4, 232 P. 936, 937

(1925). 4 "Recordable" means that by force of 12 O.S. 1991 24 an instrument meeting that section's criteria must be entered on or "recorded" in the court's journal. The clerk may "enter" only that which is "on file." The pertinent terms of 12 O.S. 1991 24 are: "Upon the journal record required to be kept by
the clerk of the district court in civil cases . . . shall be entered copies of the following instruments on file: 1. All items of process by which the court acquired jurisdiction of the person of each defendant in the case; and 2. All instruments filed in the case that bear the signature of the and judge and specify
clearly the relief granted or order made." [Emphasis added.] 5 See 12 O.S. 1991 1116 which states in pertinent part: "Every direction of a court or judge made or entered in writing, and not included in a judgment is an order." [Emphasis added.] 6 The pertinent terms of 12 O.S. 1993 696.3 , effective
October 1, 1993, are: "A. Judgments, decrees and appealable orders that are filed with the clerk of the court shall contain: 1. A caption setting forth the name of the court, the names and designation of the parties, the file number of the case and the title of the instrument; 2. A statement of the disposition of
the action, proceeding, or motion, including a statement of the relief awarded to a party or parties and the liabilities and obligations imposed on the other party or parties; 3. The signature and title of the court; . . ." 7 The court holds that the May 18 memorial's recital that "the Court finds that the motions
should be overruled" is a "finding" and not a ruling. In its pure form, a finding is generally not effective as an order or judgment. See, e.g., Tillman v. Tillman, 199 Okl. 130, 184 P.2d 784 (1947), cited in the court's opinion. 8 When ruling upon a motion for judgment n.o.v. the court must take into account all the
evidence favorable to the party against whom the motion is directed and disregard all conflicting evidence favorable to the movant. If the court should conclude the motion is sustainable, it must hold, as a matter of law, that there is an entire absence of proof tending to show a right to recover. See Austin v.
Wilkerson, Inc., Okl., 519 P.2d 899, 903 (1974). 9 See Bullard v. Grisham Const. Co., Okl., 660 P.2d 1045, 1047 (1983), where this court reviewed a trial judge's "findings of fact", perceived as a basis for his ruling on a motion for judgment n.o.v. (in the face of a defendant's reliance on plaintiff's contributory
negligence). These judicial findings were held impermissible as an invasion of the providence of the jury and proscribed by OKLA. CONST. ART, 23, 6 . Id. at 1048. 10 Everyday courthouse parlance does not always distinguish between a judge's "finding", which denotes nisi prius resolution of fact issues, and
"ruling" or "conclusion of law". The latter resolves disputed issues of law. In practice usage members of the bench and bar often confuse what the judge "finds" with what that official "concludes", i.e., resolves as a legal matter. 11 See Fowler v. Thomsen, 68 Neb. 578, 94 N.W. 810, 811-12 (1903), where the
court determined a ruling that "[1] find from the bill of particulars that there is due the plaintiff the sum of . . ." was a judgment and not a finding. In reaching its conclusion the court reasoned that "[e]ffect must be given to the entire in the docket according to the manifest intention of the justice in making
them." Id., 94 N.W. at 811. 12 When the language of a judgment is susceptible of two interpretations, that which makes it correct and valid is preferred to one that would render it erroneous. Hale v. Independent Powder Co., 46 Okl. 135, 148 P. 715, 716 (1915); Sharp v. McColm, 79 Kan. 772, 101 P. 659, 662
(1909); Clay v. Hildebrand, 34 Kan. 694, 9 P. 466, 470 (1886); see also 1 A.C. FREEMAN LAW OF JUDGMENTS 76 (5th ed. 1925). 13 "Should" not only is used as a "present indicative" synonymous with ought but also is the past tense of "shall" with various shades of meaning not always easy to analyze. See
57 C.J. Shall 9, Judgments 121 (1932). O. JESPERSEN, GROWTH AND STRUCTURE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (1984); St. Louis & S.F.R. Co. v. Brown, 45 Okl. 143, 144 P. 1075, 1080-81 (1914). For a more detailed explanation, see the Partridge quotation infra note 15. Certain contexts mandate a
construction of the term "should" as more than merely indicating preference or desirability. Brown, supra at 1080-81 (jury instructions stating that jurors "should" reduce the amount of damages in proportion to the amount of contributory negligence of the plaintiff was held to imply an obligation and to be
more than advisory); Carrigan v. California Horse Racing Board, 60 Wash. App. 79, 802 P.2d 813 (1990) (one of the Rules of Appellate Procedure requiring that a party "should devote a section of the brief to the request for the fee or expenses" was interpreted to mean that a party is under an obligation to

include the requested segment); State v. Rack, 318 S.W.2d 211, 215 (Mo. 1958) ("should" would mean the same as "shall" or "must" when used in an instruction to the jury which tells the triers they "should disregard false testimony"). 14

In praesenti

means literally "at the present time." BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 792 (6th Ed. 1990). In legal
parlance the phrase denotes that which in law is presently or
immediately effective, as opposed to something that will or would
become effective in the future [in futurol]. See Van Wyck v. Knevals, 106 U.S. 360, 365, 1 S.Ct. 336, 337,
27 L.Ed. 201 (1882).

Resolved means
resolve verb \ri-zlv, -zolv also -zv or -zov\ : to find an answer or solution to (something) : to settle or solve (something)

to make a definite

and serious

decision

to do something

Thats Merriam Webster 14 [http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/resolved]

The aff doesnt defend a certain, immediate regulatory

structure for Physician Assisted Suicide
Vote Negative
A. Spec if they make a we meet argument, then you should
vote neg on the fact that they wouldnt specify out of the 1AC
that makes it impossible to create negative strategy and restarts the debate in the 2AC, tips the balnce in favor of the aff
Predictable Limits - Regulations tie the topic specifically to
positive government action, there are infinite negative state
actions that could be taken positive action is checked by
other words in the resolution while negative state action is
not, makes it possible for extra topical plans.
Topic Ground -- all of the controversy comes from the
regulations portion of the debate
Appel 07
(Jacob M. Appel The Hastings Center Report. 2007;37(3):21-23. A Suicide Right for the Mentally Ill? A Swiss Case
Opens a New Debate http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/557817, TSW)

Advocates for the legalization of assisted suicide in the United States,

including those who sponsored Oregon's Death with Dignity Act in 1994 and current backers of California's proposed Compassionate
Choices Act,

have sought to permit the practice only under highly limited

circumstancesnamely, when the requesting patient is terminally ill.

[1] In contrast, the Netherlands allows physician-assisted suicide in nonterminal cases of "lasting and unbearable" suffering, and
Belgium authorizes physician-assisted suicide for nonterminal patients when their suffering is "constant" and "cannot be
alleviated."[2] Yet no country has laws on the subject as liberal as those of Switzerland, where assisted suicide has been legal since
1918. It remains the only jurisdiction that allows nonresidents to terminate their own lives.[3] It is also the only jurisdiction that does
not require that a physician be involved in the process. Now, a recent decision by the Swiss Federal Supreme Court threatens to
undermine yet another longstanding taboo in the debate over assisted suicide and euthanasia. In its ruling on November 3, 2006,
the high tribunal in Lausanne laid out guidelines under which, for the first time, assisted suicide will be available to psychiatric
patients and others with mental illness.[4] The case was that of an unnamed fifty-three-year-old manic depressive with two prior
suicide attempts who sought a prescription for fifteen grams of sodium pentobarbital in order to end his own life.[5] He claimed a
right to self-determination under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and alleged that no physician would
prescribe him this lethal dose for fear of legal or professional repercussions.[6] Dignitas, a Zurich-based advocacy group, supported
his suit. The Swiss high court responded with a sweeping opinion upholding the right of those suffering from "incurable, permanent,
severe psychological disorders" to terminate their own lives.[7] According to the court, a distinction should be made between
temporarily impaired individuals who wish to die as "an expression of treatable psychological disturbances" and those individuals
with severe, long-term mental illness who have made "rational" and "well-considered" decisions to end their lives to avoid further
suffering.[8] Since serious mental disorders could make life seem as unbearable to some patients as serious somatic ailments do to
others, the court reasoned, those who repeatedly expressed a wish to end their lives under such circumstances should be permitted
to do so. (The court also ruled that the plaintiff in this case would have to obtain a thorough psychiatric evaluation to determine
whether he met these standards before he could end his life.) Both supporters and opponents of assisted suicide have been highly
critical of extending suicide rights to psychiatric patients.[9] One set of objections is directed against the practice of assisted suicide
itselffor a host of reasons ranging from a belief in the inherent sanctity of human life to a fear of sliding down a slippery slope
toward involuntary euthanasia; that debate has been extensively addressed elsewhere. Another set of objections are from those
who support a basic right to assisted suicide in certain situations, such as those of terminal disease, but do not wish to extend it to
cases of severe and incurable mental illness. This resistance may be inevitable, considering the increased emphasis that
contemporary psychiatry places on suicide prevention, but the principles favoring legal assisted suicide lead logically to the
extension of these rights to some mentally ill patients.[10]

At the core of the argument

supporting assisted suicide are the twin goals of maximizing

individual autonomy and minimizing human suffering. Patients, advocates
believe, should be able to control the decision of when to end their own
lives, and they should be able to avoid unwanted distress, both
physical and psychological. While these two principles might explain
why a victim of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or cancer would choose
assisted suicide, they apply equally well in many cases of purely
psychological disease: a victim of repeated bouts of severe depression, particularly in cases where treatment
has consistently proven ineffective, rationally might prefer dignified death over future suffering. Obviously, there is a difference in
kind between the terminally ill cancer patient and the acutely depressed teenager who transiently desires to end his life after a
romantic setback; it seems logical to prevent patients from committing suicide until they have considered all of their options over an
extended period of time, and to be certain that they are not acting in haste. But the difference between a patient who desires
suicide after enduring the long-term agonies of rheumatoid arthritis or trigeminal neuralgia and the patient who wants to end his life

One crucial distinction

between chronic mental illness and terminal disease is that death is
inevitable in the latter cases. Yet "inevitable" is really not quite
right. From today's vantage point, a rapid cure for ALS or certain
cancers appears highly unlikely, yet the history of modern medicine
is replete with examples of illnesses (type I diabetes, acute
lymphoblastic leukaemia, choriocarcinoma) that have rapidly gone
from universally fatal to highly manageable. What we really mean when we speak of
after years of debilitating anxiety or intermittent psychotic episodes is not so clear.

inevitability is that we believe the patient should be able to weigh the unlikely possibility of a cure against her other interests. While
the window of opportunity for discovering effective treatment may be longer in cases of chronic mental illness, it seems reasonable
to afford the patient the same choice in balancing likelihoods against other values. And if the offer is that an effective treatment
may eventually be found, but a person will have to suffer for some decades more until that happens, then it might still be rational to

A second concern in cases of mental illness is that of the

competence of the decision-maker. For example, a severely depressed patient might substantially
prefer suicide.

underestimate her long-term prognosis. But rather than arguing against assisted suicide, this might indicate even further the depth

Clearly, patients who experience psychosis or are

incapable of making general medical decisions should not be able to
of the patient's present suffering.

take their own lives until they can think rationally. Morever, the finality of a lifeterminating decision indicates that a higher threshold of competence should be required in suicide cases than in more run-of-the-mill
health care choices. But one can be both deeply depressed and capable of making rational decisions. If the values championed by
assisted suicide advocates are maximization of autonomy and minimization of sufferingeven when they conflict with the extension
of lifethen it follows that chronically depressed, competent individuals would be ideal candidates for the procedure. At the very
least, a patient with a history of mental illness who is currently experiencing a temporary remission of symptoms will certainly be
competent enough to make such a choice before the return of the disease. (An additional concern might be the increased suffering

The
most compelling argument against extending assisted suicide rights
to the mentally ill relates to the role of physicians. The nature of psychiatric therapy
endured by families of assisted suicide victimsbut why this suffering should trump that of the patient is not clear.)

differs from that of other medical treatment in the degree of attachment between caregiver and patient. This distinction is
recognized in various regulatory codes, and most glaringly in the rules banning romantic relations between psychiatrists and former
patients, even many years after care has ceased. Moreover, psychiatrists are trained to prevent suicidean outcome widely
regarded by the profession as a failure. This conflict of interest places the psychiatrist in the unpleasant bind of choosing between a
patient's wish and the standard of care in the field. Psychiatrists might even attempt to avoid treating such rational but chronically
suicidal patients in an effort to avoid this choice. Any meaningful discussion of the subject of assisted suicide for the mentally ill
should include an exploration of alternative mechanisms by which such patients might obtain help in ending their lives, possibly
including the use of full-time thanatologists specially trained for the act.

They are extra topical -- lack of regulations means they defend

the entirety of physician assisted suicide, only PAS with
regulatory regimes are T -- voting issue because it dejustifies
the resolution and allows unpredictable additions to the rez
that we arent prepared to debate

1NC
The United States should substantially increase efforts to
educate medical professionals and patients who qualify as
terminally ill regarding the availability of palliative care
treatment, and provide substantially increased support to
facilitate necessary expansions and improvements to palliative
care programs
CP solves
Kathleen Foley and Herbert Hendin 2, Kathleen is a Professor in the
Department of Neurology at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Attending Neurologist, Pain and Palliative Care Service, also Memorial SloanKettering Cancer Center Director; Herbert is a Professor in the Department of
Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, New York Medical College and the Medical
Director, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention; The Case against Assisted
Suicide For the Right to End-of-Life Care, 2002, Johns Hopkins University Press, ebook,
http://site.ebrary.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/lib/northwestern/docDetail.acti
on?docID=10021569&ppg=1

such treatment is now possible . Having

experienced the painful death of a family member or friend, many
assume it is not. When a knowledgeable physician addresses the
desperation and suffering that underlie the request for assisted
suicide and assures patients that he or she will continue to do so
until the end of their lives, most patients change their minds , no
longer want to hasten death, and are grateful for the time
remaining to them. But at this time only a minority receive such care. In the
1997 ruling upholding the constitutionality of state laws prohibiting
assisted suicide, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that assisted suicide
was not necessary for the plaintiffs in the New York and Washington State cases it was considering because
modern medical methods of obtaining relief from suffering were
available to the plaintiffs. Justice Sandra Day OConnor summarized the
opinion of the majority of the justices in saying that for terminally ill
patients in great pain there were no legal barriers to obtaining
medication from qualified physicians to alleviate that suffering, even to
What most people do not know is that

the point of causing unconsciousness and hastening death.1

Counterplan solves compassion and death control---PAS is selfpity to rid ourselves of the reminder of our own finitude
Edmund Pellegrino 2, M.D.was the Chairman of the President's Council on
Bioethics and was the founder of the Edmund D. Pellegrino Center for Clinical
Bioethics (renamed in his honor in 2013) at Georgetown University, Compassion Is
Not Enough, found in The Case against Assisted Suicide For the Right to End-of-

Life Care by Kathleen Foley and Herbert Hendin, 2002, Johns Hopkins Press, ebook,
http://site.ebrary.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/lib/northwestern/docDetail.acti
on?docID=10021569&ppg=1
Compassion: What True Co-suffering Entails

Rejecting the argument from compassion used by the protagonists

of euthanasia and assisted suicide is not the same as rejecting the role of
compassion in the care of suffering persons. The proper role of the
emotion of co-suffering is to compel us to act in such a way toward
the sufferer that our effort to put ourselves in the sufferers place is
authentically compassionate. This is not simply to communicate pity
or mercy, but genuinely to make some of the suffering persons
burden our own. True compassion is an emotion accompanied by a desire
to help, but to help in a way that communicates our solidarity with the sufferer
without losing our ethical bearings in the process. To be helpful, we do need to
show our emotional solidarity with the one who is suffering. At appropriate
timesthrough voice, touch, silence, or conversationour feelings for the dying
person can be made manifest to him or her. True compassion makes clear our
attachment to the person, not to our own philosophy of dying or reasons
for living. Genuine compassion is indispensable in humane and loving care of suffering and dying persons. Without
it, the suffering individual feels abandoned, ostracized from the world of human interaction and communal feeling,
pitied, despised, devalued, and without dignity. Absence of compassionor the perception of its absenceadds

There
are times, however, when some degree of detachment is appropriate. Patients
need to know that our compassion does not undermine our
immeasurably to suffering and reinforces any incipient tendency to seek death in the face of suffering.

professionalism , or our capacity to act with benign paternalism

when the patient's response to illness is self-destructive. The traditional
medical virtue of equanimity has been seriously misunderstood.19 It is not a call to serene,
uninterested detachment, but a call for calm appraisal of the clinical situation
when emotions are threatening to engulf the doctor as well as the
patient and the patients family. In my own clinical teaching, I often ask dying patients what
message they want most to communicate to medical students and residents. Invariably, they say, "Please tell them
to put themselves in my place.' These words sum up our professional failings to show true compassion for those
who are suffering or dying. These patients are speaking not only of the cruder aspects of the many impersonal ways
in which we relate to them, the rudeness and uninterested detachment, but also of the subtler lapses as well: our
overly hasty visits, our failure to touch the patient physically, our demeaning turns of phrase, our habit of belittling
the patients fear or of hearing without listening, the subtle imputations of loss of dignity, self-pity, and fearall of

Seriously ill, dying, or suffering

patients have a heightened sensitivity to everything and everyone in their milieu. They
tend to associate even the most minor occurrences with their own
existential plight. They can sense indifference and insincerity as well as fear, anxiety, or the
fascination-repulsion their physical appearance may induce in others. Much of the guilt, sense of
worthlessness, and loss of dignity that suffering patients feel arises from how
they perceive our responses to their predicament. By offering the
which reinforce the patient's loss of self-worth.

possibility of an

assisted suicide or leaving the lethal drugs at the bedside, we confirm the

sufferer' devaluation of his or her own life . Our "compassion"

contributes to the patient's suffering and reinforces the desperate plea
for release by any means. True compassion means we truly share the
other's suffering. Saint Anselm puts it this way: "Compassion is our heart made wretched by the
suffering of the wretched." Obviously, we cannot enter the world of another' suffering completely. But by our
behavior we can communicate our concern, care, and feeling for the
sufferer, our human identification with him or her. In this way, the sufferer
can regain

some sense of the

worth and dignity the

predicament of

illness has

taken away . True compassion is a response to a plea for help. It is a sign that we comprehend, to some
extent, what is happening to suffering people even when we cannot relieve that suffering entirely. Patients know
that we cannot enter their predicament fully, but they can recognize when we try to see ourselves in their "place."
True compassion requires that family members, friends, and physicians recognize their complicity in the patient's

We must recognize, too, that for those who assist in or approve of it, assisting in
suicide may be an act of self-pity as much as compassion for another. The
patient's death releases caregivers from frustration, fatigue,
hostility, and guilt. A person who is debilitated, dying, and emaciated reminds
loss of dignity.

us of our own finitude , of the fact that we, too, may someday suffer the same way. Our
desire to rid ourselves of this reminder can be the unconscious
motive for our "compassionate" act of euthanasia or assisted suicide . It
goes without saying that true compassion means relieving pain to the greatest
extent possible. Pain per se is the reason for seeking death in a minority of cases, but it is a
serious moral failure, and serious malpractice as well, not to use pain
medication optimally. Compassion also means recognizing the futility of treatment when the burdens
disproportionately outweigh the benefits. It means appreciating the fact that every person suffers differently and for
different reasons. True compassion requires discernment of the unique constellation of causes that generate
suffering in this patient. It means directing our relief to those causes as they express themselves in the person of
the patient. Above all, compassionate participation in the other persons suffering means being present, available,
and accessible, even in silence if we do not know what to say. Our presence assures the person that we will not let
him or her die alonea major source of fear and suffering in terminally ill patients.

Assurance of our

presence is more comforting than the availability of a lethal dose

of medication on the bedside table , as the advocates of suicide so confidently aver.
That lethal dose only assures the patient that we, too, think his or her
life is unworthy of living. Compassionate caring permits the sufferer to continue
as a valued member of the human community until death occurs. It confirms our solidarity with the
sufferer and, paradoxically, allows for healing and even emotional and spiritual
growth . It is neither compassionate nor caring to assuage our own
emotion of co-suffering by hastening the death of the sufferer.

1NC
Once legalized, PAS will expand uncontrollably---regulations
are a myth
Daniel Callahan 2, Ph.D.Senior Research Scholar and President Emeritus of the
Hastings Center and co-director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health
Policy, Reason, Self-Determination, and Physician-Assisted Suicide, 2002, found in
The Case against Assisted Suicide For the Right to End-of-Life Care by Kathleen
Foley and Herbert Hendin, 2002, Johns Hopkins Press, e-book,
http://site.ebrary.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/lib/northwestern/docDetail.acti
on?docID=10021569&ppg=1

Physical pain and psychological suffering among those who are critically ill and dying
are great evils. The attempt to relieve them by the introduction of euthanasia and
assisted suicide is an even greater evil . Those practices threaten
the future security of the living. They no less threaten the dying themselves. Once a
society allows one person to take the life of another based on their
mutual private standards of a life worth living, there can be no safe
or sure way to contain the deadly virus thus introduced. It will go
where it will thereafter. The belief that p hysician- a ssisted s uicide
can be safely regulated is a myth the confidentiality of the doctorpatient relationship makes it impossible to provide adequate
oversight . Since we cannot know what goes on in the privacy of the
doctor-patient encounter, we can never know whether, and to what
extent, laws regulating physician-assisted suicide (and euthanasia as well) will
be violated or ignored. The lack of any correlation between suffering and a desire for suicide means,
of necessity, that physicians will have enormous discretion in assisting in suicide
but no way of knowing how to make a definitive evaluation of the
extent of, or the legitimacy of, the suffering the patient reports.

That justifies euthanasia---theres no way to hold the line

Daniel Callahan 2, Ph.D.Senior Research Scholar and President Emeritus of the
Hastings Center and co-director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health
Policy, Reason, Self-Determination, and Physician-Assisted Suicide, 2002, found in
The Case against Assisted Suicide For the Right to End-of-Life Care by Kathleen
Foley and Herbert Hendin, 2002, Johns Hopkins Press, e-book,
http://site.ebrary.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/lib/northwestern/docDetail.acti
on?docID=10021569&ppg=1

We come here to a striking pitfall of the common arguments for

p hysician- a ssisted s uicide. Once the key premises of that argument are accepted, there
will remain no logical way in the future to (1) for long hold the line against
euthanasia, to take care of those physically or psycho- logically unable to take

their own lives; (2) deny euthanasia to any competent person who
requests it for whatever reason, terminal illness or not; and (3) deny euthanasia and
p hysician- a ssisted s uicide to those who suffer but are
incompetent, even if they do not request it . I am not saying that such a scenario will
in fact take place, but only that the arguments given in favor of euthanasia
logically entail the possibility. We can erect legal safeguards and
specify required procedures to keep that scenario from coming to
pass, but over time they will provide poor protection if the logic of
the moral premises on which they are based is fatally flawed. The
safeguards will appear arbitrary and flimsy and will invite covert
evasion or outright rejection .

1NC
Dems win ad war
Blake 10/17 <Aaron, The Fix, How Democrats are winning the ad wars in 2
charts, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/10/17/howdemocrats-are-winning-the-ad-wars-in-2-charts/>#SPS
Over the final 18 days of the 2014 campaign, Republicans are set to outspend Democrats on ads in seven of the top 11 Senate races

One of the lesspublicized realities of the 2014 Senate campaign is that , while both parties are
spending hundreds of millions of dollars of money trying to secure the majority, Democrats are getting
considerably more bang for their buck. And down the stretch, they figure to
have at least a slight advertising advantage in most of the key races
-- despite being outspent overall. That's according to data compiled by Echelon Insights, a
in the country. In only four of those races, though, will the GOP actually put more ads on the air.

Republican research and analytics firm that has launched an effort to predict future ad spending using Federal Communications
Commission data. (This, we would emphasize, is an inexact science, so keep in mind that these are estimates.) Here's the

in Alaska, for
example, that Republicans figure to spend more than 72 percent of the ad
dollars in the final few weeks. Despite that spending advantage, though, they will run
less than half the ads, according to these data. There's a similar disparity in
Arkansas, though the GOP still figures to run slightly more ads than Democrats there. In fact, in only two of
the races above are Republicans getting more bang for their buck
than Democrats, and those two states are Michigan and Virginia,
which aren't really top-tier contests. So why the disparity between dollars spent and ads run? 1)
The number of ads run isn't quite the same thing as the number of
people reached by ads. You can run a bunch of ads in Grand Junction, Colo., for example, for the same price as
breakdown, both on total dollars being spent (on top) and on actual ads set to run (on bottom): You'll notice

one ad in Denver. So looking at raw numbers of ads doesn't necessarily mean Democrats will reach more people with their ads. (At
the same time, it's likely both sides spend relatively similar portions of their ad dollars in big markets vs. small markets across the

Candidates get lower ad rates than outside

groups, and incumbents tend to raise more money than challengers.
Given Democrats have so many incumbents in the races above
(nine) and Republicans have just two, that means Democrats tend to
benefit more from lower rates for candidates. 3) The following tweet is from Democratic
Senatorial Campaign Committee executive director Guy Cecil on Friday: What Cecil is referring to is the fact that reserving
ads early secures lower rates. Buying ads at this point in an election
can be very expensive, because the airwaves are flooded in the
markets playing host to competitive races (such as Manchester). The best strategy, then, is
country, so it's still a valuable measure.) 2)

always to reserve the ad space early, while it's still cheap. In this area, Democrats also benefit, because they tend to reserve the
space earlier. The DSCC has raised considerably more money than its GOP counterpart this cycle and, as an incumbent-protection

GOP groups
trying to play catch-up and even the advertising battlefield in the
states that wound up being competitive have to spend considerably
more on ads today than Democrats did when they reserved the
space months ago. "While Republican candidates are getting better rates than their Democratic competitors,
organization, had a pretty good idea where it needed to put that money early on. And it did so. Thus,

Democrats seem to be getting much more favorable rates for issue groups and party committees," said Patrick Ruffini, a co-founder
of Echelon. "Republicans are obviously much more reliant on these, which further exacerbates that ad-efficiency gap." Republicans
in the past complained that they faced sizeable advertising deficits in key states like Iowa and North Carolina, and outside groups
soon came to the rescue. Similarly, on Thursday, National Republican Senatorial Committee executive director Rob Collins (Cecil's
counterpart) mentioned that the race in Georgia is tightening. That's no coincidence; if you look at the chart above,

Republicans are about to get lapped on the airwaves

in Georgia, and Collins -- who

can't communicate directly with outside groups but can send such smoke signals -- is doing just that. We'll see if GOP outside groups
come in to close the gap. If they can afford it, of course. A few final observations about the above chart: Independent Greg Orman is
running only 16 percent of the ads in his race with Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) down the stretch. He'll probably close the gap, but it's
pretty clear he's getting vastly outspent now that the cavalry has come to Roberts's aid. Alison Lundergan Grimes (D) faces a huge
ad deficit in the Kentucky Senate race. This is because the DSCC just pulled out of Kentucky. There were some whispers that Grimes
and other outside groups could pick up the slack and keep her competitive; this shows they would have plenty of ground to make

Republicans are getting pummeled in Michigan, Oregon and

Virginia. These are no longer expected to be potential pickup
opportunities, and the ad-spending imbalance certainly won't do
much to change that. And finally, the below chart is the same as above, except that it's for the past 21 days
up.

rather than the next 18. What you'll notice is that Republicans in most races have run a higher percentage of the ads than they are
scheduled to down the stretch. So the GOP's projected advertising deficit down the stretch is relatively new. It also suggests that
things change, and given GOP outside groups have come to the rescue before, they could tip the balance again. If they want to pay
the price.

Physician assisted suicide is a wedge issue strong partisan

gap.
Saad, 11 [Lydia, Doctor-Assisted Suicide Is Moral Issue Dividing Americans
Most, 5-31-11, Gallup, http://www.gallup.com/poll/147842/doctor-assisted-suicidemoral-issue-dividing-americans.aspx, RSR]
PRINCETON, NJ --

Doctor-assisted suicide emerges as the most controversial

cultural issue in Gallup's 2011 Values and Beliefs poll, with

Americans divided 45% vs. 48% over whether it is morally
acceptable or morally wrong. Having a baby out of wedlock and abortion also closely divide Americans.
However, stronger public consensus exists on 14 other issues tested. Americans are in broadest agreement about what behaviors
are morally wrong. At least 8 in 10 U.S. adults interviewed in the May 5-8 survey say this about extramarital affairs, polygamy,
cloning humans, and suicide. At least 6 in 10 say pornography and cloning animals are each morally wrong. Widest agreement about
what is morally acceptable, ranging from 60% to 69%, is found for divorce, the death penalty, gambling, embryonic stem cell
research, and premarital sex. Also, 55% or better say medical testing on animals, gay/lesbian relations, and the use of animal fur for
clothing are each acceptable. The three most controversial issues -- doctor-assisted suicide, abortion, and out-of-wedlock births -are the ones on which fewer than 15 points separate the percentage considering the issue morally acceptable from the percentage
considering it morally wrong. Attitudes on each have been fairly stable in recent years.

Partisans disagree

widely on these issues , with majorities of Democrats accepting of all

three issues, compared with, at most, barely a third of Republicans .
Abortion is the most divisive of the three, with a 37-point Republican-Democratic gap.

GOP Senate passes Russia sanctions---Obama wont block it

Jeffrey Tayler 14, contributing editor at The Atlantic, 8/12/14, The Way Out of the
Ukraine Crisis, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/talk-tothe-russians/375898/?single_page=true

Corker, the ranking Republican on the Senates Foreign Relations Committee, introduced a
bill of stunning recklessness that seems specifically designed to destroy what
remains of relations between the U nited S tates and Russia . The legislations very
namethe Russian Aggression Prevention Act of 2014is a misnomer, for its provisions, if enacted,
would dramatically heighten tensions between Moscow and
Washington . By foreclosing the option of doing what we really need to dolaunch a serious dialogue with
Russia about how to end the Ukraine crisisit would deepen the conflict there, augment the
human misery spreading as a result, and shove us to the brink of war . In fact, the bill is
In May, Bob

already doing damage to the prospect of peace by serving Kremlin propagandists as a manifesto of U.S. intent to
force Russia to its knees and humiliate its leader. It presents an ultimatum to the Kremlin that no head of state,

The R ussian A ggression P revention A ct

is just a proposed bill, for now. But if the Republicans take the
Senate (and retain the House of Representatives) in Novembers midterm elections, the legislation
shows the direction in which Congress will push President Obama as
the current standoff intensifies. Elections aside, the measure represents a
hardline approach that the White House is warming to at a pivotal
moment in the months-long crisis when the Ukrainian military is advancing on the proleast of all the famously supercilious Vladimir Putin, would accept.

Russian rebel stronghold of Donetsk, and Russian troops are massing on the border. Corkers document reveals a
grave, even inexplicable (in light of history) misapprehension of how to deal with an assertive Russia. Ever since the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which put Russias socialist, expansionist regime at loggerheads with much of the
world for most of the 20th century, the West, and especially the United States, has struggled with a confounding
question: What to do about Russia? In the 1970s, the Nixon administration found an answer: dtente, a policy
predicated not on threats, but on dialogue. Russia is too big, too resource-rich, too vital (as an energy supplier to

Its
nuclear arsenal alonethe only such arsenal capable of destroying the
West imposes an imperative: dialogue , as distasteful as that may be to many. In short,
if Russia and the United States are quarreling, global peace is under
threat . Corkers bill purports to offer a strategic framework for United States security assistance and
Europe), and too technologically advanced to disregard (or isolate as Obama has said he hopes to do).

cooperation in Europe and Eurasia, but in fact directs the president to take a number of measures that would
imperil both objectives.

According to the legislation, the United States and NATO

would, in violation of the 1997 Founding Act (concluded between the alliance and Russia), permanently station
troops in the alliance member states of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, and accelerate (in an
unspecified way) European and NATO missile defense efforts . (There is much to
specify here, since in 2009 the Obama administration, facing strong criticism from Russia and public opposition in
the Czech Republic and Poland, the proposed host countries, scaled back plans for missile-defense systems in
Eastern Europe.) Unprecedented major non-NATO ally status is to be accorded to Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia.
Military aid is promised to Ukraine, and cryptic verbiage about providing defense articles or defense services
leaves open the possibility of doing the same for the other two former Soviet republics. There are many other
troubling provisions, but significantly, the bill instructs the president to block Russian assets and dramatically
broaden sanctions against Russia if the Kremlin does not withdraw its military from Crimea and the Ukrainian
border, and cease destabilizing the Ukrainian governments control over its eastern regions. It also directs the U.S.
secretary of state to increase efforts [to] strengthen democratic institutions and political and civil society
organizations in the Russian Federationwhich sounds an awful lot like helping NGOs in Moscow promote regime
change. (If Putin harbored any doubts that such NGOs were in the pay of the United States and working to subvert

The acts chief clauses would come into force if

Putin doesnt reverse course on Ukraine within seven to 30 days
from its enactment . How would the Russian president react to such
an ultimatum? The former FSB chief, whose 14-year tenure in the countrys highest offices
has bristled with televised displays of manliness and derring-do, would never submit to it .
him, the bill neatly resolves them.)

Sanctions have so far done nothing but consolidate domestic support for him and his Ukraine policy. Truly

damaging economic restrictions would foment more anti-Western (and, specifically, antiAmerican) hostility and strengthen Russians convictiongenerated by the virulent
propaganda streaming forth endlessly over Kremlin-controlled airwaves that the West is ganging
up on Russia and bent on destroying it. Indeed, this perception is already widespread,
and has taken root among many Russians who were previously indifferent to politics or hostile to Putin, whose
popularity now stands at 87 percent. The military measures the act proposes are positively dangerous. Providing
Western arms, intelligence, and military advisors to Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldovaall of which are clashing or
have clashed with Russiawould make possible scenarios hitherto unimaginable.

If American-made

bombs or bullets supplied to Ukraine, for example, end up killing Russian

troops, or if American intelligence helps Ukraine score significant victories against Russian-backed separatists,
Putin would have to respond or risk appearing weak . Moldova, Georgia, and
Ukraine have never formed part of a Western political, military, or economic alliance, though they have participated
in NATOs symbolic Partnership for Peace program. With the exception of Georgia, they do, however, belong to the
Russia-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States. Just what these countries would bring to the United States

Beyond the R ussian A ggression P revention A ct, the

Obama administration has shown little aptitude for dealing with the crisis
in Ukraine , imposing sanctions that have not prompted Putin to quit Crimea or stop supporting separatists in
and NATO besides trouble is hard to see.

eastern Ukraine, and spouting rhetoric that has only hardened Putins determination to not back down.

Triggers U.S.-Russia nuclear war and extinction

Steven Starr 14, Senior Scientist, Physicians for Social Responsibility, 8/22/14,
The Russian Aggression Prevention Act (RAPA): A Direct Path to Nuclear War with
Russia, http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-russian-aggression-prevention-act-rapa-adirect-path-to-nuclear-war-with-russia/5397171

The R ussian A ggression P revention A ct, introduced to Congress by U.S. Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), will
set the US on a path towards direct military conflict with Russia in
Ukraine. Any US-Russian war is likely to quickly escalate into a nuclear
war , since neither the US nor Russia would be willing to admit
defeat, both have many thousands of nuclear weapons ready for instant use, and both rely upon
Counterforce military doctrine that tasks their military, in the event of war, to preemptively
destroy the nuclear forces of the enemy. RAPA provides de facto NATO membership for Ukraine, Georgia, and
Moldova via RAPA The Russian Aggression Prevention Act, or RAPA, Provides major non-NATO ally status
for Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova for purposes of the transfer or possible transfer of defense articles or defense
services. Major non-NATO ally status would for practical purposes give NATO membership to these nations, as it
would allow the US to move large amounts of military equipment and forces to them without the need for approval

RAPA would effectively bypass long-standing

German opposition to the US request to make Ukraine and Georgia
part of NATO. Germans rightly fear placing US/NATO troops and US Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) in
of other NATO member states. Thus

Ukraine, given the profound and long-standing Russian objections against the expansion of NATO (especially to
Ukraine and Georgia) along with deployment of European US/NATO BMD. Germany is acutely aware of the distinct

civil war raging in Ukraine could evolve into a UkrainianRussian war. Under such circumstances, deployment of US/NATO forces in
Ukraine would make it virtually inevitable they would come into
fight with Ukraine against Russia . RAPA would accelerate the implementation of phase three of the European Phased Adaptive
possibility that the

Approach for Europe-based missile defense . . . by no later than the end of calendar year 2016. In 2012, Russias highest ranking military officer stated that Russia might consider a preemptive strike against such BMD deployments when the situation gets harder. RAPA Directs DOD [US Department of Defense] to assess the capabilities and needs of the Ukrainian
armed forces and Authorizes the President, upon completion of such assessment, to provide specified military assistance to Ukraine. RAPA would have the US quickly supply Ukraine
with$100 million worth of weapons and equipment, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, crew weapons, grenade launchers, machine guns, ammunition, and Mine Resistant
Ambush Protected vehicles. RAPA requires the Obama administration to use all appropriate elements of United States national powerto protect the independence, sovereignty, and
territorial and economic integrity of Ukraine and other sovereign nations in Europe and Eurasia from Russian aggression. This includes substantially increasing United States and NATO
support for the armed forces of the Republics of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, and substantially increasing the complement of forward-based NATO forces in those states.
Consequently, RAPA would produce significant buildups of US/NATO forces into Poland and the Baltic States, accelerate the construction of US BMD systems in Eastern Europe, and
authorize substantial U.S. intelligence and military aid for Ukrainian military forces that continue to lay siege to the largest cities in Eastern Ukraine. If RAPA did not result in the
deployment of US forces to Ukraine, it would certainly position them for rapid deployment there, in the event that the Ukrainian civil war escalates into a Ukrainian-Russian conflict. RAPA
intensifies support for ethnic cleansing in Eastern Ukraine In Russia, Putin now is under intense domestic political pressure to send Russian forces into Eastern Ukraine, in order to stop
the attacks by the Ukrainian military on the cities there, which were once part of the Soviet Union.These attacks have created an absolute humanitarian catastrophe. On August 5, 2014,
the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that 740,000 Eastern Ukrainians had fled to Russia. They go there because Russia is close, and because most
of the refugees are ethnic Russians, a fact that explains why the Russophobes in Kiev have been quite willing to indiscriminately bombard their cities. What is taking place in Eastern
Ukraine amounts to ethnic cleansing, the forced removal of ethnic Russians from Eastern Ukraine. This is a process that is fully supported by the US; RAPA would greatly enhance this
support. Ukrainian military forces have surrounded Donetsk a city of almost one million people and have for weeks conducted daily attacks against it using inaccurate multiple-launch
rockets, heavy artillery fire, ballistic missiles carrying warheads with up to 1000 pounds of high explosive, and aerial bombardments. Water supplies, power plants, train stations,
airports, bridges, highways, and schools have all been targeted, along with the general population. In Lugansk, a city of more than 440,000 people, a humanitarian crisis has been
declared by its mayor, because the siege of the city has left it with little medicine, no fuel,intermittent power, and no water since August 3 (three weeks at the time of this writing). After
the separatists of Eastern Ukraine demanded autonomy from Kiev, and then reunion with Russia, the government in Kiev branded them as terrorists, and sent its military forces against
them in what they euphemistically call an anti-terrorist operation. Framing the conflict this way makes it politically acceptable to refuse to negotiate with the separatists, and easier to
justify in the US and Europe, which have grown accustomed to the War on Terrorism. However, the thousands of Ukrainians being killed and hundreds of thousands of being driven from
their homes are just ordinary people, trying to live ordinary lives. The New York Times reports the Ukrainian military strategy has been to bombard separatist-held cities and then send
paramilitary forces to carry out chaotic, violent assaults against them. Many of the Ukrainian paramilitary forces were recruited from ultra-nationalist, neo-Nazi political parties; the

Azov battalion flies the Wolfs Hook flag of Hitlers SS divisions. Considering that more than 20 million Russians died fighting the Nazis during World War II, the presence of openly Nazi
militias attacking ethnic Russians in Ukraine creates extreme anger in Russia. RAPA supports plans in Kiev for an attack on Crimea The Russian Aggression Prevention Act demands that
Russia withdraw from the eastern border of Ukraine, which is by definition, the Russian border. In other words, RAPA provocatively demands that Russia remove its own military forces

RAPA also
demands that Russian forces must have withdrawn from Crimea
within seven days of the enactment of the Act. Not likely to happen, given
away from its own borders, while Ukrainian military forces are meanwhile massed on the other side, attacking predominantly Russian cities.

that (1) Crimea was part of the Russian empire from 1783 until 1954, (2) withdrawal from Crimea would require
Russia to abandon its only warm water port at Sevastopol, where Russian forces have been based, by
internationally recognized treaty, since 1997, and (3) more than three-quarters of all Crimeans voted yes to

in the eyes
of Russia, the requirement to withdraw from Crimea amounts to a
US demand that Russia surrender Russian territory. Putin has just taken the
reunify with Russia, a vote which Russia accepted by its subsequent annexation of Crimea. Thus,

entire Russian Duma (the Russian House of Representatives) to Crimea, to address them there and strongly make

RAPA, however, stipulates that the US

does not recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea, and creates sanctions
the point that there will be no withdrawal from Crimea.

and legal penalties for anyone who does. RAPA therefore provides both military and political support for Ukrainian
President Poroshenkos stated goat that Ukraine will retake Crimea. This goal was recently echoed by the Ukrainian
defense minister, who was applauded by the Ukrainian Parliament when he told them that the Ukrainian army will
have a victory parade in Sevastopol. These statements are taken seriously in Moscow, where they are viewed as a
promise to attack Russia. Thus, Putins advisers are telling him he must fight today in Eastern Ukraine, or tomorrow
in Crimea. Any Russian military intervention in Eastern Ukraine would certainly be described in the West as Russian
aggression in pursuit of empire, which would trigger deafening demands that US/NATO forces act to support

Should NATO intervene, subsequent Russian military action against

any NATO member would trigger the alliances Chapter 5 mutual
defense clause, committing it to war with Russia . Any major Ukrainian
attack upon Crimea would make war with Russia inevitable . Ukraine
appears to be preparing for such an assault by drafting all men of ages 18 to 60
Ukraine.

years, in a forced mobilization of its armed forces, which also includes calling up its active reserves of one million
men, and bringing more than 1000 battle tanksout of storage. Putin is being told by his close advisers that Ukraine
will have an army of half a million men in 2015. RAPA would provide hundreds of millions of dollars to train and arm
the rapidly expanding Ukrainian armed forces, and position US/NATO forces for rapid intervention on the side of
Ukraine in the event of a Ukrainian-Russian war. Thus, the many political and military provisions of RAPA would
certainly act to fully encourage Ukraine to carry out its stated policy to retake Crimea. The Republic of Georgia
attacked Russian forces in 2008 with far fewer US promises of aid. Of course, RAPA would also arm Georgia, too.

A US/NATO-Russian war would

instantly put US and Russian nuclear forces at peak alert , with both sides
anticipating a nuclear first-strike from the other. Both the US and Russia have changed
their nuclear war-fighting plans to include the use of preemptive nuclear
first-strikes ; both nations have tactical nuclear weapons designed for
RAPA moves the US towards nuclear war with Russia

battlefield use. The US has 180 B61 nuclear bombs deployed on six military bases of five other NATO states, which
would be released to these NATO members in the event of a US/NATO-Russian war. Russia also has at least 1300
tactical nuclear weapons, and Russian war doctrine specifies their use against overwhelming conventional (NATO)
forces. Any use of tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons, by either side, would likely trigger an equal or greater
response from the other. During the first Cold War, the US studiously avoided any direct military confrontation with
Russia, because it was widely thought that such a war would inevitably escalate to become a nuclear war which
would utterly destroy both nations. However, there seems to be little thought or discussion of this in the US today,
despite the fact that both the US and Russia appear to be preparing for such a war. In May, the increasing tensions
in Ukraine led both nations to almost simultaneously conduct large nuclear war games. Long-range Russian nuclear
bombers tested US air defenses16 times in a ten day period (July 29 August 7). US and Russian leaders are either
unaware or choose to ignore the fact that such games and tests are a dress rehearsal for human extinction.

Peer-reviewed scientific studies predict the environmental

consequences of a war fought with only a fraction of US and/or
Russian strategic nuclear weapons would likely wipe out the human
race . Scientists predict that even a successful US nuclear first-strike, which

destroyed 100% of Russias nuclear forces before they could be launched,

would create

catastrophic changes in global weather that would eliminate growing seasons for years.
Most humans and large animals would starve to death. Nuclear war is suicide for humans ,
but our leaders still have their fingers on the nuclear triggers. There seems to be absolutely no awareness,
either in our Federal government or in the American public, of the existential danger posed
by nuclear war. Such ignorance is embodied by The R ussian A ggression
P revention A ct, which if enacted will put us on a direct course for
nuclear war with Russia .

1NC
Medicalization is the FRAMEWORK in which thanatopolitics
may exert violence -- increasing the power of physicians over
life gives justification for the creation of bare life and war
[makes a causal claim that wars are NOT fought for the existence of the sovereign,
which answers THEIR internal link of death control, they are fought based on the
biological heirchies medicalized and biologized interps of the world]
Stuart Elden, politics at University of Warwick, 2/29/20 02 [The War of Races and
the Constitution of the State: Foucault's Il faut dfendre la socit and the Politics
of Calculation, Boundary,
http://boundary2.dukejournals.org/content/29/1/125.full.pdf]

The reverse side is the power to allow death . State racism is a

recoding of the old mechanisms of blood through the new procedures of regulation.
Racism, as biologizing , as tied to a state, takes shape where the procedures
of intervention " at the level of the body , conduct, health , and everyday
life, received their color and their justification from the mythical
concern with protecting the purity of the blood and ensuring the
triumph of the race" (VS, 197; WK, 149). 37 For example, the old anti-Semitism based on religion is
reused under the new rubric of state racism. The integrity and purity of the race is threatened, and the state
apparatuses are introduced against the race that has infiltrated and introduced noxious elements into the body. The
Jews are characterized as the race present in the middle of all races (FDS, 76). 38

The use of medical

language is important . Because certain groups in society are conceived

of in medical terms , society is no longer in need of being defended
from the outsider but from the insider: the abnormal in behavior,
species, or race. What is novel is not the mentality of power but the
technology of power (FDS, 230). The recoding of old problems is made
possible through new techniques. A break or cut (coupure) is fundamental to racism: a
division or incision between those who must live and those who must die.
The "biological continuum of the human species" is fragmented by the
apparition of races, which are seen as distinguished, hierarchized, qualified as good or inferior, and so forth. The
species is subdivided into subgroups that are thought of as races. In
a sense, then, just as the continuum of geometry becomes divisible in Descartes, 39 the human
continuum is divided, that is, made calculable and orderable, two
centuries later. As Anderson has persuasively argued, to suggest that racism has its
roots in nationalism is a mistake. He suggests that "the dreams of racism actually have their
origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation: above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to blue'
or white' blood and breeding among aristocracies." 40 As Stoler has noted, for Foucault, it is the other way around:
"A discourse of class derives from an earlier discourse of races." 41 But it is a more subtle distinction than [End
Page 147] that. What Foucault suggests is that discourses of class have their roots in the war of races, but so, too,
does modern racism; what is different is the biological spin put on the concepts. 42 But as well as emphasizing the
biological, modern racism puts this another way: to survive, to live, one must be prepared to massacre one's
enemies, a relation of war. As a relation of war, this is no different from the earlier war of races that Foucault has

spent so much of the course explaining. But when coupled with the mechanisms of mathematics and medicine in

Bio-power is able to establish,

between my life and the death of the other, a relation that is not warlike or confrontational but
bio-power, this can be conceived of in entirely different ways.

biological : "The more inferior species tend to disappear, the more abnormal individuals
can be eliminated, the less the species will be degenerated, the more Inot as an individual but as a specieswill
live, will be strong, will be vigorous, will be able to proliferate." The death of the other does not just make me safer
personally, but the death of the other, of the bad, inferior race or the degenerate or abnormal, makes life in general
healthier and purer (FDS, 22728). "The

existence in question is no longer of

sovereignty, juridical ; but that of the population, biological . If

genocide is truly the dream of modern powers, this is not because
of a return today of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is
situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale
phenomena of population" (VS, 180; WK, 136). "If the power of normalization wishes to exercise the ancient

if, inversely, a sovereign power, that is to

wishes to function with the instruments,
mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it must also pass
through racism" (FDS, 228). This holds for indirect deaththe exposure
to deathas much as for direct killing. While not Darwinism, this biological sense of
sovereign right of killing, it must pass through racism. And
say a power with the right of life and death,

power is based on evolutionism and enables a thinking of colonial relations, the necessity of wars, criminality,
phenomena of madness and mental illness, class divisions, and so forth. The link to colonialism is central: This form
of modern state racism develops first with colonial genocide. The

theme of the political enemy

is extrapolated biologically. But what is important in the shift at the end of the nineteenth
century is that war is no longer simply a way of securing one race by eliminating the other but of regenerating that
race (FDS, 22830). As Foucault puts it in La volont de savoir: [End Page 148]

Wars are no longer

waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are

waged on behalf of the existence of all; entire populations are
mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of
life necessity . Massacres have become vital [vitauxunderstood in a dual sense, both as essential and
biological]. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race,
that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars,
causing so many men to be killed. (VS, 180; WK, 136)

The alternative is non-medicalized suicide

Salem 99
Tania, Associate at Hospital Operations & Compliance at The Advisory Group W.L.L, Physician-Assisted Suicide:
Promoting AutonomyOr Medicalizing Suicide? Hastings Center Report, 29: 3036, AB

if legalized,
physician-assisted suicide as a legitimate practice would become
the prerogative of physicians. Indeed, Jack Kevorkian has seen the exclusive right as the
foundation for a new medical subspeciality of obitiatry.17 This monopoly leads to the more
general question of why aid in dying should be provided only by a
Medicalizing suicide as professional practice Medicalizing suicide also points to the fact that

medical practitioner . Why, that is, should assistance in suicide be

understood as requiring medical authority rather than, for instance, a

community of family or friends? The most obvious answer is that physiciansand only
physicianshave the necessary technical skills to ensure a rapid and painless death. But as some critics have
noted, Assisted

suicide does not even require medical skill . If freeing

up patients truly is the goal, then assisted suicide's advocates

disserve patients when they do not advocate ending the
physician's exclusive power to prescribe medication. Ironically, the
advocates of patients rights end up empowering doctors more
than they do patients .18 Yet even those who maintain that technical knowledge is imperative do
not confine their justification of physician-assisted suicide to this reason. Placing suicide under the
stewardship of medicine is further defended as a way of enhancing
public accountability of the practice and protecting against abuse.19 From the patient's
perspective, the request for aid in dying may mean a desire for companionship in pursuing a difficult course of
action, a wish for confirmation of a decision about which the patient is unsure or simply a cry for help (pp. 8889,
note 42). Moreover, since suicide is still stigmatized, seeking a physician's assistance may be a way of trying to

But inasmuch as cultural preconceptions and

loneliness (whatever its source) are far from being exclusively medical
issues, we must ask why we expect doctors to respond to them . Two
possible answers come to mind: either medicine is moving beyond its proper role,
or the scope of medical competence has already been extended
beyond appropriate boundaries.It seems reasonable to conclude that ceding
remove that stigma.20

monopoly of assistance in suicide to doctors is anchored in an

inflation of the physician's role , as well as in the extreme
idealization of physicians character and the relationships they
establish with patients. The bond physicians establish with patients is supposedly effective,
collaborative, and committed.21 Both this idealization and the willingness to delegate to
physicians the exclusive right to assist suicide bespeaks the social
and symbolic power already conferred on medicine and medical professionals in
our societies. In other words, it is not (or not only) the need for technical expertise
that impels us to physician-assisted suicide. Rather, our culture, so
impregnated by medicalization , takes for granted that assisted
suicide should fall under the control and supervision of medicine.
Medicalizing the morality of suicide As a legitimate domain of professional practice, then, physicianassisted suicide necessarily involves medicalizing the moral
questions surrounding suicide . Physician-assisted suicide

presupposes, and

ultimately is, a medical judgment about death or suicide; it is a

medical evaluation of the fairness and legitimacy of a person's (not
simply a patient's) desire or choice to end his or her life. With some few exceptions, even the most radical

advocates of physician-assisted suicide recognize the need to establish protocols and guidelines to prevent abuses,
protect the vulnerable, guarantee public accountability, and even to assure the autonomous character of the
patient's choice. Surely these aims are respectable and the setting up of criteria just and reasonable. Yet

establishing medical guidelines also introduces tensions into the

value of autonomy in several ways .

1NC Case
All lives are infinitely valuable, the only ethical option is to
maximize the number saved
Cummisky, 96 (David, professor of philosophy at Bates, Kantian
Consequentialism, p. 131)

even if one grants that saving two persons with dignity cannot
outweigh and compensate for killing onebecause dignity cannot be
added and summed in this waythis point still does not justify
deontologieal constraints. On the extreme interpretation, why would not killing one
person be a stronger obligation than saving two persons? If I am
concerned with the priceless dignity of each, it would seem that 1 may still saw two; it is
just that my reason cannot be that the two compensate for the loss
of the one. Consider Hills example of a priceless object: If I can save two of three priceless
statutes only by destroying one. Then 1 cannot claim that saving
two makes up for the loss of the one. But Similarly, the loss of the two is not outweighed by the
one that was not destroyed. Indeed, even if dignity cannot be simply summed up. How
is the extreme interpretation inconsistent with the idea that I
should save as many priceless objects as possible? Even if two do not simply
outweigh and thus compensate for the lass of the one, each is priceless: thus, I have good
reason to save as many as I can. In short, it is not clear how the extreme interpretation justifies the
Finally,

ordinary killing'letting-die distinction or even how it conflicts with the conclusion that the more persons with dignity who are saved,
the better.*

Fear of deaths inevitable

Etogre 7
(E.T. Ogre, news website for the advance of the human species, The Evolution of
Religion: Playing on Mankinds Greed, Hope, and Fears, NM, http://etogre.com/theevolution-of-religion-playing-on-mankinds-greed-hope-and-fears/168/)

The fear of death is a survival instinct hard-wired into the

majority of living creatures on Earth. This fear of death is perhaps
best illustrated in a classic psychological example the fight-orflight response. This is a reaction that can normally be observed by backing an animal into a corner,
essentially forcing them into a stressful life or death situation. Adrenaline starts pumping, survival mode takes

This
instinctive response occurs because death is essentially the
unmitigated antithesis of survival, the key principle of evolution.
To suggest that humans in general naturally desire to exist
forever is not exactly an unprecedented claim.
over, and the animal will either attempt to flee or hold its ground in a battle to the death.

No value to life doesnt outweigh---prioritize existence

Torbjrn Tnnsj 11, the Kristian Clason Professor of Practical Philosophy at
Stockholm University, 2011, Shalt Thou Sometimes Murder? On the Ethics of
Killing, online: http://people.su.se/~jolso/HS-texter/shaltthou.pdf

if Schopenhauer is right, if life is never worth

living, then according to utilitarianism we should all commit suicide
and put an end to humanity. But this does not mean that, each of us
should commit suicide. I commented on this in chapter two when I presented the idea that
utilitarianism should be applied, not only to individual actions, but to collective
actions as well. It is a well-known fact that people rarely commit suicide. Some even claim that no one who is
I suppose it is correct to say that,

mentally sound commits suicide. Could that be taken as evidence for the claim that people live lives worth living?
That would be rash. Many people are not utilitarians. They may avoid suicide because they believe that it is morally

It is also a possibility that, even if people lead lives not

worth living , they believe they do . And even if some may believe that
their lives, up to now, have not been worth living , their future lives
will be better . They may be mistaken about this. They may hold false expectations about the future. From
wrong to kill oneself.

the point of view of evolutionary biology, it is natural to assume that people should rarely commit suicide. If we set
old age to one side, it has poor survival value (of ones genes) to kill oneself. So it should be expected that it is
difficult for ordinary people to kill themselves. But then theories about cognitive dissonance, known from
psychology, should warn us that we may come to believe that we live better lives than we do. My

strong

belief is that most of us live lives worth living. However, I do believe that our lives
are close to the point where they stop being worth living. But then it is at least not very far-fetched to think that

for the sake of

the argument assume that our lives are not worth living, and let us
accept that, if this is so, we should all kill ourselves. As I noted above, this
does not answer the question what we should do, each one of us . My
conjecture is that we should not commit suicide. The explanation is simple. If I kill
myself, many people will suffer. Here is a rough explanation of how this will happen: ... suicide
they may be worth not living, after all. My assessment may be too optimistic. Let us just

survivors confront a complex array of feelings. Various forms of guilt are quite common, such as that arising from
(a) the belief that one contributed to the suicidal person's anguish, or (b) the failure to recognize that anguish, or (c)

Suicide also leads to rage, loneliness, and

awareness of vulnerability in those left behind. Indeed, the sense that suicide is an
essentially selfish act dominates many popular perceptions of suicide. The fact that all our lives
lack meaning , if they do, does not mean that others will follow my
example. They will go on with their lives and their false expectations at least for a while devastated
the inability to prevent the suicidal act itself.

because of my suicide. But then I have an obligation, for their sake, to go on with my life. It is highly likely that, by
committing suicide, I create more suffering (in their lives) than I avoid (in my life).

Fear of death is a pre-requisite to deaths symbolic value

Cara Kalnow 9 A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of MPhil at the University of St.
Andrews WHY DEATH CAN BE BAD AND IMMORTALITY IS WORSE https://researchrepository.st-andrews.ac.uk/bitstream/10023/724/3/Cara%20Kalnow%20MPhil
%20thesis.PDF

our
lives could accumulate value through the satisfaction of our desires
(PA) also provided us with good reason to reject the Epicurean claim that the finitude of life cannot be bad for us. With (PA), we saw that

beyond the boundaries of the natural termination of life. But Chapter

Four determined that the finitude of life is a necessary condition for the value of life
as such and that many of our human values rely on the finite temporal
structure of life. I therefore argued that an indefinite life cannot present a desirable alternative to our finite life, because life as
such would not be recognized as valuable. In this chapter, I have argued that the finitude of life is
instrumentally good as it provides the recognition that life itself is
valuable . Although I ultimately agree with the Epicureans that the finitude of life cannot be
an evil, this conclusion was not reached from the Epicurean
arguments against the badness of death, and I maintain that (HA) and (EA) are insufficient to
justify changing our attitudes towards our future deaths and the finitude of life. Nonetheless, the instrumental good of the finitude of life that we
arrived at through the consideration of immortality should make us realize that the finitude of life cannot be an evil; it is a necessary condition for the
recognition that life as such is valuable. Although my arguments pertaining to the nature of death and its moral implications have yielded several of

my position still negotiates a middle ground between

the Epicureans and Williams, as (PA) accounts for the intuition that it is rational to fear
the Epicurean conclusions,

death and regard it as an evil to be avoided

. I have therefore reached three of the Epicurean conclusions

pertaining to the moral worth of the nature of death: (1) that the state of being dead is nothing to us, (2) death simpliciter is nothing to us, and (3)

we can rationally fear

our future deaths, as categorical desires provide a disutility by
which the prospect of death is rationally held as an evil to be
avoided. Finally, I also claimed against the Epicureans, that the prospect of death can rationally be regarded as morally good for one if one
no longer desires to continue living. 5.3 Conclusion I began this thesis with the suggestion that in part, the Epicureans were
right: deathwhen it occursis nothing to us. I went on to defend the Epicurean position
the finitude of life is a matter for contentment. But against the Epicureans, I have argued that

against the objections raised by the deprivation theorists and Williams. I argued that the state of being dead, and death simpliciter, cannot be an evil
of deprivation or prevention for the person who dies because (once dead), the personand the grounds for any misfortunecease to exist. I

it is rational to fear death and to regard death as an evil to be

avoided, not because death simpliciter is bad, but rather because the
prospect of our deaths may be presented to us as bad for us if our
deaths would prevent the satisfaction of our categorical desires.
Though we have good reasons to rationally regard the prospect of
our own death as an evil for us, the fact that life is finite cannot
be an evil and is in fact instrumentally good, because it takes the
threat of losing life to recognize that life as such is valuable . In this chapter, I concluded
that even though death cannot be of any moral worth for us once it
occurs, we can attach two distinct values to death while we are alive :
we can attach a value of disutility (or utility) to the prospect of
our own individual deaths, and we must attach an instrumentally good
value to the fact of death as such. How to decide on the balance
of those values is a matter for psychological judgment.
accounted for the anti-Epicurean intuition 115 that

Suicide doesnt solve thanatopolitics

Michelsen 11
[Nicholas, "Suicide Terrorism, Biopolitics And Death", International Studies
Association, MA International Conflict Studies From King's College London, Histories
Of Suicidal Violence, Jihadism Terrorism, Complexity Theory ,
Poststructuralism/Continental Philosophy, The Internet]

In such a case the biopolitics of suicide is indeed a dead end.

Suicide can never be an

effective biopolitical response , only forming a political rejection to

sovereign logics (Seery 1996). As sovereignty fades, so does the political role of death. It is only
in the perennial resurgence of sovereign discourses (through racial
exclusion) that death again becomes again relevant to power.
Suicide -bombing, therefore, leaves the zeitgeist, biopower,
untouched . If we desire to investigate how suicide-bombing might
represent a fundamental engagement with the structures of
contemporary global order we can however, and against Ojakangas, follow
Foucault (2004) himself inasmuch as he explicitly argued that biopower and
sovereign have always existed in some form of hideous historical
combination. This refuses to firmly divide history into a
progression of discrete forms of power . In this context, Giorgio Agambens
(1995) reading of Foucault, which Ojakangas (2005) explicitly rejects, seems far more
useful. Agamben argues that a conception of biopower (life-order)
as a separate discourse entering into sovereignty (death-order) is
deeply problematic . He feels that Foucault fails to sufficiently develop the essential relationship
between biopolitical subjectivization and objectivizing sovereign power that circulates around understanding there
to be a nexus or foundational intersection around the decision on where death should be that is immanent to lifepolitics. Agamben breaks down the already not-so- firm distinction between

biopower

sovereignty and

in Foucault, by arguing that the two not only cross-over, but

linked . The nexus

are intrinsically

between biopower and sovereignty, political life and

exposure to

death, is an ontological feature of all political praxis (Agamben

1995). It is the fact that it is a politics of death that constitutes
this link between the two diagrams of power that is

the

crucial

point for

the argument being made here. Agamben argues, following Schmitt, that political sovereignty has always
functioned through making an exception - deciding who is under the law and who lies outside of it, but that this

Every political order draws a

definitive line of political life, in which the ability to decide on
death is always the operative exercise. The bios of the political
legal exception has always been tied to the question of life itself.

community , where life is pursued and administered, are

necessarily and always predicated on the construction of
thanatopolitical spaces . Indeed it is, ironically given that disco urses of human
rights are so often mobilised in opposition to the deathly logics of
sovereign power , precisely in these biopolitically produced
thanato-spaces that the concept of life-itself as a life that is
fundamentally exposed to death is originally developed (Agamben 1995,
p83).

2NC

2NC O/V
Being able to engage in the regulations of the aff key to solve
concepts of Death
Somerville 01
(Margaret Somerville Death Talk pg. xii-xix McGill-Queens University Press)

We all need to engage in "death talk" if we are to accommodate,

with some degree of comfort, the inevitable reality of death into the
living of our lives. And we must do this both as individuals and as
members of society. Until the last few decades, most of us participated in death
talk as part of our religious practice. Today, in industrialized Western
societies, the euthanasia debate provides a prominent context for such
talk.

This book contains a collection of papers, which I have written over the last twenty years, on euthanasia and

p hysician-

a ssisted s uicide, and the debate that has surrounded these issues . Death
confronts us with terror and aloneness, even if we are accompanied
by loving others. We can respond in two ways. In the first, we can take
control of death and view it - and life - in a reductionist way. Euthanasia is
often a manifestation of this approach. Many advocates of euthanasia, while they value human
life and respect it within given parameters, do not view it as having
any intrinsic value, mystery, or meaning. Rather, they value human life for what it provides, and
believe that, when the human machine deteriorates beyond some point- when we, or others, judge the quality of life as "not worth
living" euthanasia allows a dignified exit from life. One politician of this school of thought (Mr Jeff Kennett who was then premier
of the state of Victoria in Australia) summed it up in this way: When you are past your "use-by/"best-before date, you should be
checked out as quickly, cheaply, and efficiently as possible. This politicians consumer-market-values approach to death - perhaps
even seeing the morality of death as being worked out in the morality of the market place - can be compared with the approach and
attitudes to death captured in a beautifully bound large book placed on a stand in the non-denominational chapel of an Australian
hospice. The messages written in this volume by people - from small children who have just learned to write to spouses whose
lifetime partners are dying - capture an intangible reality that I am unable to describe but that can be experienced in reading the
entries. The impression about what human death and dying involves that I was left with was the polar opposite of the one generated
by the politicians remarks. This reaction opens up the other way to deal with death: to search for meaning in it. People who do so
often view human life as having intrinsic value, encompassing a mystery (at least the mystery of the un- known), eliciting a
response that contains wonder and awe. They believe that legalizing euthanasia would put at high risk the likelihood that we will
find meaning in death, and that this possibility threatens our ability to find it in life. Death talk" and life talk" are two sides of the
same coin, and the content of these two forms of talk is inextricably intermingled: death talk forms part of life talk and vice versa.
We run serious risks as individuals and societies, moreover, if we fail to balance one with the other. In this book, I want to balance
the death talk articulated in the euthanasia debate-with life talk and to articulate the harmful impact that accepting euthanasia
would have on the latter's content. One of the great difficulties in the euthanasia debate is that we lack a secular vocabulary that
can adequately capture the non-physical - the metaphysical - realities we need to create, protect, and live in if we are to experience
fully human lives. Traditionally, we have used the language of religion to create the intangible, invisible, immeasurable reality that is
essential to our human well-being, both as individuals and as a society. Often, we still need to employ the vocabulary of that
language to capture the dimension of human spirit which we need, whether we are religious or not. The use of this language
can cause difficulties for those who reject religion and the supernatural because ' they see this vocabulary as invoking these
entities. But in using this language in a secular context, I do not intend to base my arguments on religion or to rely on the
'supernatural. By the human spirit I mean the deeply intuitive sense of relatedness or connectedness to the world and the universe
in which we live."2 To recognize this dimension of ourselves is to recognize that we are more than gene machines" and more than
just logical, rational beings. We can create this dimension through shared language in the broadest sense of both words. Indeed, one
challenge of globalization is to find a language and vocabulary that will cross the boundaries of religion and of ethnic and national
origin (the boundaries of culture) and capture the profound realities of the human spirit that can give meaning to our fives - and
deaths. The euthanasia debate is one important context in which we have an opportunity to contribute to finding this common
human spirit and the shared language that will elicit and describe it. We are story-telling animals. Some of our most important
shared stories are in the form of metaphor, parable, and poetry. We communicate through imagination and intuition as much as
reason and cognition. And we can find and communicate certain realities only in- directly, not directly. Some kinds of knowledge can
be sought only by setting up metaphorical-metaphysical spaces within which we hope to encounter them. This is true with regard to
knowledge and wisdom about death. Setting up a space of that kind depends on having a sense of be- longing to a community.
Many of us have lost this sense and, consequently, have difficulty finding or entering the metaphorical- metaphysical space we need
when we, or those we love, are dying. In facing the circumstances of death, it can be much harder for us than it was for our
ancestors to fulfil the need to cry and to laugh through the tears; to come together to share the pain of loss and the joy of memory;

and to participate with others in poetry, ritual, and song. Euthanasia is one response to this loss. In this book I explore the causes,
scope, and impact of the contemporary euthanasia debate. I argue in chapter 1 in Part One that this dc- bate is part of the search for
a new cultural paradigm on which to base the societal structure. This search is also being undertaken in the con- text of gene tics
and reproductive technologies. What we do and choose not to do in relation to both the passing on of human life (genetics and
reproductive technologies) and the ending of it (euthanasia) will create the metaphysical reality, the sense of meaning, within which
we live our lives. We have always used birth and death, the two great "marker events" of human life, as central to our search for
meaning. As long as we humans have been around, we have become ill, aged, suffered, and died, and others have always been able
to kill us. Euthanasia is not a new question. But our kind of society has rejected it for over two thousand years. Why, then, has the
legalization of euthanasia been seriously considered in industrialized Western societies within the last twenty years? These are the
same societies, moreover, that have made astonishing advances in the ability to relieve pain and suffering. Not all of us agree on
the reasons, though most of us admit they are multiple and complex. These factors are explored in chapter 6, Legalizing

One reason the

euthanasia debate might have emerged now in industrialized
Western countries is that recent extraordinary medical successes
have expanded our life span and changed the diseases from which
we are most likely to die from acute ones (which killed us quickly) to
chronic ones (which do not). In general, people who die of chronic diseases cost the health-care system much
Euthanasia: Why Now?" one of several chapters in Part Two on the evolution of the euthanasia debate.

more than those who die suddenly. We are also aging populations, which means that more of us are likely to die of chronic diseases.
In short, our medical successes benefit us, but they also present us with their cost and the need to recognize our inability as a
society to provide all the health care that might benefit everyone who wants it. It is, and should be, very difficult to face someone
whom we know we could help with very expensive medical treatment and refuse access to it. Recently, the connection between
euthanasia and the saving of health-care resources has been articulated in public forums, although the topic has always been
discussed privately. In chapter 2, I address the question, Should the Grandparents Die?" The reasons behind calls for the
legalization of euthanasia are complex, as is the debate itself. Consequently, we need to be aware of the ways in which the case for
one side or the other is promoted. The case for legalization has been promoted, for instance, through confusion with other acts or
situations that do not, in general, raise ethical and legal difficulties. This confusion must be identified and carefully explored. I aim to
demonstrate in chapter 7, Euthanasia by Confusion, that such an investigation could make us see some of the arguments
differently. Another reason given for the need to legalize euthanasia is that it is necessary to relieve pain. In Part Three I discuss pain
and pain-relief treatment, and their relation to euthanasia. We have been grossly negligent, even malevolent, in our failure to treat
pain. And, looking back, I find it difficult to imagine how we could have been so inhumane. Increasing sensitivity to the pain of
others, especially on the part of health-care professionals, has been a major advance of the last twenty years. This awareness is
particularly true with respect to those who are unable to communicate their pain easily, whether because they are too young, too
old, or of a different cultural or linguistic background. Because euthanasia is a topic of debate, it matters how we carry out that
debate. Often this debate centres around what is required to respect dying people. The chapters in Part Four deal with that issue.
Some of these chapters consist of my responses to others contributions, some of which were, in turn, responses to mine. They also
include my reviews of two books written by advocates of legalization. Finally, in Part Six, I examine some foundational concepts in
health ethics and law that are relevant to the euthanasia debate. Chapter 21 explores some of the concepts that govern decisionmaking concerning medical treatment at the end of life autonomy, self-determination, competence, and voluntariness. The
approaches taken to these concepts in law, psychiatry, and ethics are compared and contrasted. In exploring euthanasia, we need
to undertake a broader analysis than one based merely on ideas that are familiar to people living in an industrialized Western
democracy. Human rights was one of the most important global concepts of the second half of the twentieth century, and, in recent
years, human rights in health and health care have been a focus of attention. Human rights is not, however, a universally accepted
concept in all circumstances - in part because the language of rights can seem too Western and too legalistic to some other
societies and cultures. We have always recognized that human rights necessarily encompass human responsibilities, and yet, in the
West, we have been nervous of expressly naming the latter for fear they could be used as instruments to deny human fights.
Governments might argue that human rights depend on fulfilling human responsibilities as defined by the state. In chapter 22, on
human rights in health and health care, I identify a concept of human ethics". This concept is not meant in any way to detract from
the importance of human rights. Indeed, the contrary is true. The idea is that human ethics might be a more neutral and a more
universally acceptable term than human rights, at least that term standing alone. In short, human rights and human responsibilities
both express the concept of human ethics - and it ex- presses them; they are interchangeable. Adopting the concept of human
ethics would mean that, even if a state does not recognize human rights (legally enforceable claims of individuals or groups against
the state), it would still be bound by fundamental principles of human ethics. One of those principles, I believe, is that, except in
essential self-defence, we must not kill each other not even for reasons of the utmost mercy and compassion. Consequently,
euthanasia would contravene the requirements of human ethics. The euthanasia debate has much to teach us. Those who oppose
euthanasia might wish that the debate had never emerged, yet, pro- vided the outcome remains that euthanasia is prohibited, the
net result of this debate might be beneficial. We have already learned much. We know, for example, that people who want
euthanasia have lost all hope. When we are terminally ill, by definition, we cannot, apart from a miracle, hope for long-term survival.
Yet there arc things we can still hope for - to see a loved person, to see the next sunrise and hear the dawn chorus of birds, to

e is our connection with the future, and that

future need not be distant to play its essential role in allowing us to
experience hope. Hope is our connection with life and with the continuation of life - even when we know we will die
cuddle a kitten or pat a friendly dog. Hop

(which is true for most of us for most of our lives). Euthanasia confirms the power of death over hope, of death over life. It fails to
recognize the great mystery that allowing death to occur, when its time has come, is an act of life. Euthanasia is an act of death.
There is a vast difference between natural death and euthanasia. In our often unsubtle, un-nuanced, very physically oriented, nonmetaphysically sensitive world at the dawn of a new century, many of us are failing to recognize how some deaths, and some forms
of death, are compatible with life and hope, but others, especially those resulting from euthanasia, are not. It might be that in less
sophisticated times, certainly in less scientifically sophisticated ones, we comprehended this distinction through our intuition. We
knew through true simplicity. Often, when we gain knowledge, we move from true simplicity to a chaos phase in which we find it

. It is only when we can

structure the chaos to understand the deep roots and complexities
involved in what we do, and the symbols and values affected , that we can
make decisions on an adequate and comprehensive basis. These decisions are often similar to
those made on the basis of true simplicity, but the resemblance is
superficial. These decisions are based on apparent simplicity, which
difficult to structure our new knowledge and to formulate appropriate responses

comes with deep understanding.

The need for discussing regulations OUTWEIGHS the moral

issues up for debate
Prado 98
(Cynthia A. Prado J.D. candidate, University of Southern California Law School, 1999; B.A. Psychology, Minor
Bioethics, University of Southern California, 1996. EFFECTS OF GENDER DIFFERENCES ON PHYSICIAN-ASSISTED
SUICIDE: PRACTICE AND REGULATION Fall, 1998 8 S. Cal. Rev. L. & Women's Stud. 101, Lexis, TSW)
I. PHYSICIAN-ASSISTED SUICIDE: BACKGROUND AND ISSUE OF GENDER American legal and philosophical movements regarding an

legislation, specifically regarding

euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, is constantly being proposed in the United
States. The first piece of such legislation was introduced in 1906. n11 The strong devotion to the Western philosophy of selfindividual's right to die have always been profound and strong. MDEL

determination and autonomy was clearly demonstrated by Judge Cardozo in 1914 when he wrote that "every human being of adult

Although the United

States has a long history of common law and proposals of legislation
supporting this philosophy, only within the last decade has passing
legislation legalizing physician-assisted suicide been likely. This is
due to the growing support for the practice of physician- assisted suicide. n13
Moreover, passage of legislation has actually occurred in the last
two years with the enactment of the Oregon Death with Dignity Act. It is the world's first statute affirmatively legalizing the
practice of physician-assisted suicide. n14 In view of the [*105] obvious growing support for the
legalization and practice of physician- assisted suicide, discussion on how it should be
years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body." n12

regulated may take priority over moral and philosophical discussions.

In all practices in areas of life - familial, cultural, educational,
vocational, legal and medical - there will always be risk of abuses, as
well as people who are more vulnerable than others to such abuses. In
the practice of physician-assisted suicide, the least powerful groups of people
in the United States are generally the most vulnerable to the risk of abuses.
These groups include women, minorities, the elderly and the poor,
all of whom are mostly aware of their vulnerability. This is evidenced
by their lack of support for the legalization of physician-assisted suicide. n15
Regarding gender, most surveys and polls show that women consistently oppose euthanasia and physician- assisted suicide
practices more than men. n16 Members of all these groups are also more likely to request such practices for the many different
reasons discussed in part two of this Article. The recent, albeit insufficient, focus on gender in MDEL discussions has been triggered

To begin, the
practice of physician-assisted suicide is most widely known to Americans by the
media publicity of the infamous Michigan physician, Dr. Kevorkian.
From the media presentation, most of his assistees n17 have [*106]
by a recognition of gender patterns, specifically the disproportionate involvement of women.

been middle-aged women. n18 Thus, many critics of Kevorkian have depicted his practice of physicianassisted suicide as gender-biased. n19 One critic has even described his practice as "womanslaughter." n20 If Kevorkian's assisted
suicides are viewed as typical of the requests and grants of all physician-assisted suicides, then it may be expected that the practice
of physician-assisted suicide will disproportionately involve women. However, this expectation may not be correct in view of the fact
that the total number of Kevorkian's assistees has been grossly underestimated. Kevorkian claims to have assisted between 70 and
100 people in ending their lives, and states that he receives two to three requests a day for his assistance. n21 It is also reported
that "nearly half of the requests are from men" which may further discredit any finding or expectation of a gender pattern. n22
Therefore, in order to extrapolate from Kevorkian's physician-assisted suicide practice to that of broader society, accurate gender
proportions of Kevorkian's potential and actual assistees must be obtained. A second recognized gender pattern that has triggered a
focus on gender issues in MDEL are legal developments arising through case law. New precedents regarding MDEL in both American
and Dutch law have primarily involved women. n23 In the United States, precedents were created by the cases of Elizabeth Bouvia,
n24 Karen Ann [*107] Quinlan n25 and Nancy Cruzan. n26 In the Netherlands, recent legal developments have involved the highly
controversial case of Chabot. n27 This case law pattern and Kevorkian's pattern may or may not be an accurate depiction of the

the patterns have triggered

needed and long overdue discussion of gender issues and gender
implications in this area of bioethics.
current and future practice of physician- assisted suicide. Nevertheless,

B.) Political Analysis DA -- Focused debate over state

regulations of PAS are key to cost-benefit analysis and
deliberation -- the alternative is abstract moral relativism that
fails to translate into material change
Smith 99
George, Professor of Law @ The Catholic University of America, Notre Dame Journal Of Law, Ethics & Public Policy,
Vol. 13, Judicial Decision-Making in the Age of Biotechnology, AB

Bioethics can be seen as having no defined essence which sets it apart as a

distinct study or discipline. Rather, its individuation derives from a de facto set of issues interrelated by what might

a common thread joining all of the issues is

exceedingly difficult to find, the central core comprising the list of these issues, without question, is a
felt concern over the technology of control of man's body, his mind,
and quality of life. Many of the concerns of bioethics are concerns of
be termed "family resemblances." While

public policy or with legislation and policy guidelines at state ,

local, and federal levels , that need to be enacted and enforced
with respect to all of the issues comprising the de facto set . It has been
suggested that bioethical concerns are but those prohibitions all rational people urge everyone to follow in an effort
to avoid evils on which common agreement exists.

Outside the individual context

determining how one treats another, for moral acceptability to be given at the broader societal level,

of

democratic consensus must be reached acknowledging that a

certain good must be promoted

though its promotion causes some degree of harm. It is

within this setting where much of what is recognized as "bioethics" is focused. While

individual

morality operates primarily within a system of restraints , policies

affect ing society as a whole operate on a level where promotion of
good is a moral option. The pivotal question thus becomes , "what goods
Of necessity, priorities , values, and goods
must be weighed, balanced, and compared. Whenever the benefits and the risks of a
ought to be restrained (e.g., scientific research)?"

particular course of action are weighed, it is well remembered that those very elements in the balancing test are
based upon judgments about values, with the penultimate goal being the formulation and validation of a final action

In a more specific sense,

bioethics encompasses a whole political movement . 6 It is a

which minimizes human suffering and maximizes the social good. 5

movement which seeks to harness political forces to deal with a

plethora of ethical problems relating to health care delivery, both at the
micro and the macro level of economic distribution. It also endeavors to
respondoften through legislative reforms to complex issues such
as physician assisted suicide , cryonic suspension, genetic discrimination in the workplace,
abortion, privacy, sterilization, human experimentation, collaborative reproduction by use of in vitro fertilization,
artificial insemination, cloning, and personal relationships necessary to create a family by homosexuals and
lesbians. 7 All too often,

contemporary society's concerns over the need for

regulating ethical regimes to guide or even control these activities

has driven it in turn to seek medical laws about areas such as death and
dying, genetic counseling and screening, reproductive technologies, and organ transplants. Often there is
little choice for legal passivity or inaction since " the law is a
primary vehicle for resolving disagreements about public policy
and the treatment of real persons ."8 And today, Americans seem to be reshaping their
political questions ultimately into judicial questions.9 Yet, a healthy degree of skepticism is needed to see the
inherent limitations on the legal system in its efforts to regulate biomedical developments. 10

Each legal

tool used must be constantly fine-tuned and re-evaluated by

ever changing public policies all with the purpose of determining
which of the

tools

is

best fitted to deal with specific biomedical

problems" and

which one

human suffering

validates a final action that ideally minimizes

and maximizes the social or common good.

Legalizing PAS means regulations

Urofsky 98
(Melvin I. Urofsky Professor of History and Public Policy, Virginia Commonwealth University; Adjunct Professor of
Law, University of Richmond School of Law. A.B., 1961, Ph.D., 1968, Columbia University; J.D., 1983, University of
Virginia. LEAVING THE DOOR AJAR: THE SUPREME COURT AND ASSISTED SUICIDE March, 1998 32 U. Rich. L. Rev.
313, Lexis, TSW)
A number of doctors bitterly fought the proposal. They had been trained to save lives, not to take them, and they saw

Initiative 119 as opening the doors to a flood of abuse. When the Washington
State Medical Society debated the issue, delegates voted five to one against it, but a poll of the general membership taken earlier in

One can surmise that although doctors do

help some of their patients die, they prefer to keep this part of their
practice quiet. To legalize physician-assisted suicide would mean
the year showed doctors split rather evenly.

additional regulation of medical practice. Although early signs

indicated that Initiative 119 would pass, opponents gained ground
as election day approached. Critics claim that American [*340] voters are apathetic, but Initiative 119
galvanized the populace, and voters came out in large numbers. The initiative failed by a 54-46% margin. n101 Both sides agreed
that the debate had been useful and that an important public policy issue had been raised, one that would not quietly go away. n102
"If we don't deal with the problems raised by 119, we'll be facing this issue again and again and again," said Dr. Peter McGough, an
opponent of the measure. McGough stated further that "saying no to assisted death is not enough. Now we have a responsibility to
deal with the problems that brought out this concern." n103

Precision of PAS discussion is key to having a meaningful

discussion esoteric ethical questions are irrelevant
EPEC 03
(Education In Palliative And End-Of-Life Care For Oncology Self-Study Module 14: Physician-Assisted Suicide
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/cancerlibrary/epeco/selfstudy/module-14/module-14-pdf, TSW)

The debate about legalizing active steps to

intentionally end life as a means to end suffering remains
controversial. Because of the added risk of misunderstanding or overriding
the patients wishes, there is currently less support for euthanasia
than for physician-assisted suicide. Nonetheless, both requests do occur and physicians need to
know how to respond to either type of request. In any discussion of p hysician- a ssisted s uicide or
The legal and ethical debate

euthanasia,

it is important that the terminology be clear.

Euthanasia is defined as the act

of bringing about the death of a hopelessly ill and suffering person in a relatively quick and painless way for reasons of mercy.

Physician-assisted suicide is defined as the act of a physician in

providing the means for a patient to hasten his or her death. Although
they may have similar goals, physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia differ in whether or
not the physician participates in the action that finally ends life. In physician-assisted
suicide, the physician provides the necessary means or information and the patient
performs the act. In euthanasia, the physician performs the intervention. In the
current debate, there are two principles on which virtually all agree. First, physicians have an obligation
to relieve pain and suffering and promote the dignity of dying patients in their care. Second, the principle
of patient bodily integrity requires that physicians respect patients competent decisions to forgo life-sustaining treatment. An
important event in the present debate occurred in 1997, when the United States Supreme Court recognized that there is no federal
constitutional right to physician assisted suicide but did affirm that state legislatures may choose to legalize it. As of early 1999,
Oregon is the only state that has voted to legalize PAS. In contrast to the PAS debate, the right to palliative care is uniformly
acknowledged. The same U.S. Supreme Court Justices concurring opinions supported the right of all Americans to receive quality
palliative care. Professional competence As most physicians are likely to receive a request for hastened death, every physician must
be capable of dealing with these difficult requests in a way that responds to the needs and expectations of the patient and offers the
best possible care that is both ethical and legal. The ability to respond to requests for hastened death with realistic alternatives
requires a working knowledge of all aspects of palliative care. The physician must follow usual standards for communication, know
how to provide aggressive symptom control and supportive care, and be skilled at approaches to withdraw or withhold lifesustaining interventions (see EPEC-O Module 7: Communicating Effectively; EPEC-O Module 8: Clarifying Diagnosis and
Prognosis; EPEC-O Module 2: Cancer Pain Management; EPEC-O Module 3: Symptoms; and EPEC-O Module 11: Withdrawing
Nutrition, Hydration). Physicians need to be aware of the legal issues described in the original EPEC Curriculum Plenary 2: Legal

As effective approaches for responding to suffering

may be time consuming, physicians will be more effective if they
work collaboratively with other health care disciplines in an
interdisciplinary team. Some requests for PAS or euthanasia can be intense,
and even skilled and experienced physicians require access to
consultative palliative care expertise as part of the spectrum of
Issues in End-of-life Care.

contemporary health care (see EPEC-O Plenary 2: Models of Integrated Care). Objectives The objectives of
this module are to: Define physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and euthanasia. Describe their current legal status. Identify root
causes of suffering that prompt requests. Understand a six-step protocol for responding to requests. Six-Step Protocol for
Responding to Requests for Physician- Assisted Suicide or Euthanasia Any request for PAS should be taken seriously. Response
should be immediate and compassionate. Six steps can be identified for responding to such requests: 1. Clarify the request. 2.
Assess the underlying causes of the request. 3. Affirm your commitment to care for the patient. 4. Address the root causes of the
request. 5. Educate the patient and discuss legal alternatives. 6. Consult with colleagues. While each step will be discussed in this
module in sequence, these steps should integrate smoothly and flexibly into actual practice as issues arise. Depending on the
particular case, some steps may be implicit or accomplished in a few words, while others may be complex and require considerable
time to respond. Step 1: Clarify the request When a patient first raises the issue it is necessary to clarify just what he or she means.
The patient may assume that if there is a routine treatment available for a condition that threatens his or her life, there is little
choice other than to accept it, as if doing less than everything to prolong life is tantamount to suicide. By making it clear that it is
legally and ethically permissible to decline treatmentseven antibiotics for infection and tube nutrition and hydrationand allow a
natural death to occur, patients may be satisfied that their lives will not be prolonged against their wishes. (Ref. 29)

Sometimes a patient will use a provocative statement such as, I

hope youll help me die when its time or Please promise not to let
me suffer, as if to test the physicians willingness to talk about the
patients fears of dying badly. It is important to understand whether
the patient is actually referring to physician-assisted suicide or
euthanasia , or adequate analgesia. Many people do not make these
distinctions and , while expressing themselves in the language of
assisted suicide, they are actually asking for assurance of a way to
escape suffering if it becomes unbearable. Such patients are commonly reassured to learn
that good palliative care extends to whatever treatments are necessary to alleviate physical distress. At the same time, patients
may need assurance that effective pain management, including a morphine drip or sedation when necessary, is not a euphemism
for euthanasia, but rather good medical care for a serious medical problem. In discussing sedation with patients, the practice must
be distinguished from euthanasia. Sedation for otherwise intractable symptoms is consistent with the treatment of pain in burn units
and surgical suites. The same principle of careful titration of anesthetic agents as necessary for adequate treatment and patient

When cases of requests to hasten death are

presented in ethical papers or in public debates, they often look like
ethical puzzles that involve complex, irresolvable psychosocial
issues and existential suffering. In the real world of patients lives
and clinical practice, these cases are not esoteric ethical or clinical
puzzles but, rather, the pleas of fearful, vulnerable people looking
to their physicians for reassurance, affirmation, and practical help.
When a patient asks for hastened death, listen carefully to the
nature of the request. Ask open-ended questions in a calm and nonjudgmental manner to elicit specific
comfort applies to palliative sedation. (Ref. 30)

information about the request that is being made and the underlying causes for it. While some physicians fear that talking about
suicide or hastened death will increase the likelihood that the patient will act, this fear has not been substantiated. An open
discussion is more likely to reduce the intensity of the request. Once the underlying reasons are known, more directed questions can
be asked. Several examples, and the common areas to which answers may point, follow: MD: What makes you ask that? - Desire
for a pain-free death - Control over the dying process MD: What do you expect will happen without PAS? - Understanding and
expectations of the illness - Expectation of what dying will be like MD: What type of assistance do you want? - Pills, injection MD:
Who do you want to be involved? Why? - Self, family member, physician MD: When do you think you want to die? - Now - At
some later point MD: What do you hope to accomplish? - Freedom from pain, disability, bankruptcy, dependency, indignity Removing burden on others The answer to the question, When do you think you want to die? will provide some indication of acuity.
The answer to the question, What do you hope to accomplish? will provide some understanding of the patients reasoning and
what he or she is hoping for. During the course of the questioning, it is particularly important to learn whether the patient is
imagining future symptoms or other conditions that are either unlikely or easily preventable. As you listen to the answers, use the
therapeutic effect of empathic listening. Avoid endorsing the request for PAS in a way that confirms the patients perception that his
or her life is worthless. Similarly, avoid rejecting the request when it is first heard as this will often serve to close rather than open
discussion. Remember that empathizing is not the same as agreeing. Premature affirmation of any perspective can propel both
parties to stark choices. Only when the patients point of view has been characterized will it be possible to talk about what suffering
means to the patient and what assurances can or cannot be given. Personal biases vs. therapeutic listening To respond effectively to
the needs of the patient, the physician must be aware of his or her own biases and the potential for counter-transference. If the idea
of suicide is offensive to the physician, the patient may feel his or her disapproval and worry about abandonment. Conversely, if the
physician feels it would be best for everyone if the patient were to die soon, the patient may sense this and become more concerned

about being an unwelcome burden. Be open to the possibility that your personal reactions to the patients suffering may give insight
into his or her experience. For example, if you feel weighed down by meeting with the patient, perhaps the patient is depressed. In
making the request, the patient is opening a door for communication. The therapeutic response to a request for assisted suicide or
euthanasia begins with listening. Possibly because listening involves little outward motion, it seems passive to the casual observer
and its value as an active therapeutic intervention is often unrecognized. In actuality, the physicians ability to listen and
commitment to stay involved are the main components of an effective response. The therapeutic power of listening must not be
underestimated. (Ref. 29) (Ref. 31) For a physician confronted with a request to hasten death, the critical early intervention often
consists of a handful of minutes spent listening to the patients fears and acknowledging his or her suffering, coupled with firmly
committing to remain involved, try new ways to improve the patients quality of life, and provide support the patient and family
need during this difficult time. The physician-patient relationship is the most powerful therapeutic resource with which to intervene
in suffering. By carefully assessing and effectively treating pain and other symptoms, a physician reaffirms the patients confidence
in the physicians knowledge and skills. Similarly, willingness to explore a patients suffering and fears engenders confidence in the
physicians compassion and willingness to be there in the hard times that may lie ahead. Patients suffering is often rooted in fears
of the future; patients can often tolerate the current situation but worry what will happen if things get worse. (Ref. 25) Physicians
can use this aspect of suffering to therapeutic benefit. It is often possible to diminish an acutely anxious patients distress and
improve the patients sense of control by drawing attention to the present moment in which the discomfort is tolerable, if only
barely, and by emphasizing that life is a series of present moments. The future-based nature of most suffering allows physicians to
inform and affirm for patients that there is always something they can do to decrease the severity of pain or other symptoms and

Outlining specific steps that can be

taken if pain or other cancer-related symptoms worsen can be
reassuring for patients and their loved ones. Patients who fear dying
in uncontrolled physical agony are often reassured that palliative
sedation is available for situations in which suffering cannot be
otherwise controlled. (Ref. 32) Social suffering that comes from a felt loss of meaning, i.e. a sense of having
support patients and families through these difficult times.

nothing to contribute and being merely a burden to others, i.e. is not without therapeutic response. A loved ones illness and care
almost inevitably impose burdens on that persons family. All who love the person are affected by his or her illness in emotional and
practical ways. Serious illness disrupts plans and sometimes derails long-held aspirations. Here again, there are no pat answers.
While it is essential for physicians to affirm their commitment to suffering patients, they need not shoulder these responsibilities
alone. The multidimensional suffering of progressive cancer is best addressed by interdisciplinary approaches to care. (Ref. 33)
Hospice and palliative care programs can respond in skillful ways, and often identify ways of lessening the burden and enabling
families to care well and with love without losing their own lives in the process. Step 2: Assess the underlying causes of the request
A request for PAS may indicate a failure to address the full scope of a patients needs. Focus on all four dimensions of physical,
psychological, social, and spiritual suffering as well as practical concerns (see EPEC-O Module 1: Comprehensive Assessment).
Assess for clinical depression Among all the psychological and physical possibilities, give particular consideration to the presence of
clinical depression or anxiety, as research indicates correlation between requests for PAS and their presence. (Ref. 9) (Ref. 28) When
evaluating psychological and social issues; explore patients fears about the future. Clinical depression occurs frequently and is both
under-diagnosed and undertreated. It can be a source of intense mental suffering and a barrier to completing life closure and
achieving a good death. Diagnosis of depression is more challenging in patients with advanced illness, since the physical
symptoms typically associated with depression (e.g., changes in appetite, weight, energy level, libido, or sleeping) frequently occur
in these patients as a result of their illness. Studies have shown that the screening question, Do you feel depressed most of the
time? is highly sensitive and specific in the medically ill. Feelings of pervasive helplessness, hopelessness, and worthlessness are
not normal. Do not assume that they are situational and leave them unattended (see EPEC-O Module 3: Symptoms). Psychosocial
suffering, practical concerns Emotional and coping responses to life-threatening illness may include a strong sense of shame,
feelings of being unwanted, and difficulties coping. Adjustment to the loss of previous function, independence, control, and/or selfimage may be difficult. Each change may lead to tension within relationships that further increase isolation and misery. Worries
about practical matters (e.g., who the caregivers will be, how domestic chores will be done, who will care for dependents and pets,
etc.) can create considerable distress. If support is not forthcoming or is insufficient, suffering may ensue or increase. Approaches to
the assessment of psychosocial issues and practical concerns are covered in EPEC-O Module 1: Comprehensive Assessment.
Physical suffering A host of physical symptoms may accompany advanced illness. These may include pain, breathlessness,
anorexia/cachexia, weakness/fatigue, nausea/vomiting, constipation, dehydration, edema, incontinence, loss of function, sleep
deprivation, etc. Their presence, particularly if they are unmanaged for long periods, may markedly increase suffering. Approaches
to the assessment of physical issues are covered in EPEC-O Module 1: Comprehensive Assessment. The management of pain is
discussed in EPEC-O Module 2: Cancer Pain Management. The management of other common physical symptoms is discussed in
EPEC-O Module 3: Symptoms. Spiritual suffering The prospect of dying may evoke seemingly unresolvable existential concerns
that are then experienced as suffering. As illness advances and disability increases, the patients sense of his or her meaning, value,
and purpose in life may all come into question. If there is a sense of abandonment or punishment by God, faith and religious beliefs
may be eroded and anger may ensue. Approaches to the assessment of spiritual issues are covered in EPEC-O Module 1:
Comprehensive Assessment. Fears for the future In addition to current concerns, many patients are fearful about their future. They
may worry about pain and other symptoms, loss of control or independence, abandonment, loneliness, indignity, loss of self-image,
and being a burden to others. While their thoughts may be unrealistic in the setting of quality care, many have witnessed
suboptimal care in others that fuels their fears and fantasies. Direct questions may be adequate to assess a patients fears. If not,
discussing a series of scenarios and preferences, as is done during advance care planning, may be helpful. When personal values
and goals of care are being discussed, clarify the things the person most wants to avoid. This may help preempt unrealistic fears
(see EPEC-O Module 13: Advance Care Planning). Step 3: Affirm your commitment to care for the patient Patients facing the endof-life often have fears of abandonment. Listen to and acknowledge expressed feelings and fears. Make a commitment to help find
solutions to the issues of concern, both current and anticipated. Reinforce that you want to continue to be the patients physician
until the last possible moment. Explore options to allay immediate concerns and fears. As a request for hastened death affects
everyone who is close to the patient, a commitment to the patient also affirms a commitment to the family and those close to the
patient, including other caregivers. Step 4: Address the root causes of the request This section provides a general framework for

Start by
discussing the patients health care goals and preferences,
explaining palliative care approaches and services, and describing
the legal alternatives to PAS. Remember that some patients may not trust either individual health
addressing some of the potential root causes for a request for hastened death in each dimension of suffering.

caregivers or the health care system to meet their needs. If possible, it helps to discuss this lack of trust with the patient at the
outset so the issues can be understood, if not dealt with, early (see EPEC-O Module 13: Advance Care Planning; EPEC-O Module
1: Comprehensive Assessment; EPEC-O Module 9: Negotiating Goals of Care; and EPEC-O Module 12: Conflict Resolution).
Address psychological suffering As psychological suffering can lead to requests for physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia, its
management warrants considerable attention. Start by assessing and managing depression, anxiety, or delirium aggressively (see
EPEC-O Module 3: Symptoms). Because patients emotional responses to illness can be profound and coping responses vary, they
will require careful exploration in a positive and understanding way. Supportive counseling that involves active listening and
acknowledgment of the patients feelings may be woven into general care, or it may be provided more intensively through
dedicated individual or group counseling. Social workers and chaplains trained in supportive counseling can provide considerable
assistance. Referral to trained counselors, psychologists, or psychiatrists may be required if the issues are complex and/or the risks
are high. Patients can be helped to see their physical dependence as an unavoidable consequence of their illness, rather than a
personal failure. Clinicians can foster a sense of dignity through the manner in which care is provided. In coming to know the patient
as a person, the physician acknowledges the uniqueness and inherent worth of that individual. Death awaits us all; therefore, if hope
were to reside solely in avoiding death, all hope would ultimately be lost. In practice, it is often possible for patients who are
approaching the end-of-life to reframe hope and discover meaningful opportunities that still exist. (Ref. 29) (Ref. 34) Physicians can
assist patients to identify achievable goals, such as participating in meaningful events, engaging in life review, completing personal
affairs and relationships, and feeling prepared to leave this life. (Ref. 35) Address social suffering, practical concerns Stresses and
conflicts in the social or practical aspects of a persons life can have profound effects on his or her will to live. Express interest and
inquire in detail about this aspect of the patients life: What is the patients family situation? Does he or she live with someone?
Are family members supportive? Are there unresolved issues? What is the patients financial situation? Is health insurance
available and sufficient? Are legal affairs in order? Does the patient have a Living Will, Power of Attorney for Health Care, Power of
Attorney for Business Affairs, or Last Will and Testament? Where would the patient like to receive care? Who is there to help? Who
will the caregivers be? Is there tension over the caregiving role for either party? Who attends to domestic chores such as cooking,
cleaning, shopping, banking, and/or bill payments? Are there any dependents the patient cares for, or pets? Who will care for them
if the patient is unable to? Consider requesting assistance from other members of the health care team (e.g., social workers, nurses,
chaplains, occupational therapists, etc). Additional resources for help and support may be available in the community, through a

Multiple studies
indicate that patients with life-threatening illnesses have many
unaddressed physical issues. If left unmanaged for long periods,
each can add considerably to a patients sense of suffering. Today, the field of
health care institution, or from a local hospice or palliative care program. Address physical suffering

medicine has more knowledge and tools to manage physical symptoms than ever before. Pain and symptom management are
discussed in detail in EPEC-O Module 2: Cancer Pain Management and EPEC-O Module 3: Symptoms. Each symptom needs to be
pursued aggressively and successful management often requires extensive and careful thought and individual clinical trials until

Physiatrists, nurses,
and physical and occupational therapists may be helpful and
knowledgeable about the exercises and aids that can be used to optimize and maintain
symptoms are brought under control. Function is critical to maintaining independence.

function and ensure safety. Sexuality and intimacy are integral aspects of each individual, particularly as experienced through touch
and closeness to cherished partners and family members. Illness and disfigurement may change the way people are able to interact.
To determine individual desires and uncover tensions, facilitate discussions between partners and key family members. Help them
look for alternatives that may be comforting.

Spec DA
Extend Appel 07 controversy stems
Accurate division of ground matters distorting the literature
base mean mislearn the topic and never get into the heart of
what the topic literature means turns all their education args
Informed precise debate is key to correct understanding
Emanuel '98
(Chief, Department of Clinical Bioethics, Warren G. Magnuson Clinical Center, National Institutes of Health Ezekiel
82 Minn. L. Rev. 983)
In Washington v. Glucksberg n1 and Vacco v. Quill n2 the Supreme Court Justices did the right thing by rejecting a
constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide (PAS) or euthanasia. n3 They also reached the correct decision in
not foreclosing state legalization of these interventions. The decisions will foster a lively debate in the states about
the ethics and political prudence of permitting these interventions. Although a few Justices held out hope for a more
narrow constitutional right to PAS or euthanasia, the majority holdings permanently shifted the forum, the
arguments, the perspective, and the justifications in the debate over PAS and euthanasia. The forum is no longer
the courts, but the legislatures and public squares. The arguments are no longer about constitutional rights, but
ethics and prudent policies. The perspective is no longer first person, but third per- [*984] son. And the justifications
no longer appeal to individual autonomy and beneficence, but to probable social goods and harms. This is as it

As the debate proceeds, however, it must be better

informed. The debate needs to move away from this or that heart-wrenching case
calling out for euthanasia, shake off the distortions concerning endof-life practices that have so far informed it, and carefully examine what likely
benefits and harms might result from legalization. This means that there
should be in a democracy.

will be even more emphasis on accurate empirical assessments of

likely practices and consequences related to PAS
assumptions about PAS

or euthanasia

or euthanasia.

Current

based on abstract argumentation

and logical inferences will need to be tested empirically if public

policy is to be prudent . Some of these assumptions
empirical assessment. But others

already have been shattered by

will require a commitment to collect additional

data to make public debate more informed.

The details matter anyone can affirm in the abstract

Ignatieff 4 (Michael, Lesser Evils, Carr professor of human rights at Harvard, p. 20-1)
As for moral perfectionism, this would be the doctrine that a liberal state should never have truck with
dubious moral means and should spare its officials the hazard of having to decide between lesser and
greater evils. A moral perfectionist position also holds that states can spare their officials this
hazard simply by adhering to the universal moral standards set out in human rights
conventions and the laws of war. There are two problems with a perfectionist stance, leaving
aside the question of whether it is realistic. The first is that articulating nonrevocable,
nonderogable moral standards is relatively easy. The problem is deciding how to apply
them in specific cases. What is the line between interrogation and torture, between targeted
killing and unlawful assassination, between preemption and aggression? Even when legal and moral

distinctions between these are clear in the abstract, abstractions are less than helpful when
political leaders have to choose between them in practice. Furthermore, the problem with
perfectionist standards is that they contradict each other. The same person who shudders,
rightly, at the prospect of torturing a suspect might be prepared to kill the same suspect in a
preemptive attack on a terrorist base. Equally, the perfectionist commitment to the right to life

might preclude such attacks altogether and restrict our response to judicial pursuit of
offenders through process of law. Judicial responses to the problem of terror have their place, but
they are no substitute for military operations when terrorists possess bases, training camps, and heavy
weapons. To stick to a perfectionist commitment to the right to life when under terrorist attack might
achieve moral consistency at the price of leaving us defenseless in the face of evildoers. Security,
moreover, is a human right, and thus respect for one right might lead us to betray another.

Case

2NC Cumminksy
Extinction first VTL/ethics inevitable and reversible and
lower value to life doesnt mean no value to life
Bernstein 2 (Richard J., Vera List Prof. Phil. New School for Social Research,
Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation, p. 188-192)

There is a basic value inherent in organic being, a basic affirmation, "The Yes' of
Life" (IR 81). 15 "The self-affirmation of being becomes emphatic in the opposition of life to
death. Life is the explicit confrontation of being with not-being. . . . The 'yes' of all striving is here sharpened by
the active `no' to not-being" (IR 81-2). Furthermore and this is the crucial point for Jonas this
affirmation of life that is in all organic being has a binding obligatory force
upon human beings. This blindly self-enacting "yes" gains obligating force in the seeing freedom of man, who as the
supreme outcome of nature's purposive labor is no longer its automatic executor but, with the power obtained from
knowledge, can become its destroyer as well. He must adopt the "yes" into his will and impose the "no" to not-being
on his power. But precisely this transition from willing to obligation is the critical point of moral theory at which
attempts at laying a foundation for it come so easily to grief. Why does now, in man, that become a duty which
hitherto "being" itself took care of through all individual willings? (IR 82). We discover here the transition from is to
"ought" from the self-affirmation of life to the binding obligation of human beings to preserve life not only for the
present but also for the future. But why do we need a new ethics? The subtitle of The Imperative of Responsibility

Modern
technology has transformed the nature and consequences of human action
so radically that the underlying premises of traditional ethics are no longer valid . For
the first time in history human beings possess the knowledge and the power to destroy
life on this planet, including human life. Not only is there the new possibility of total nuclear disaster;
In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age indicates why we need a new ethics.

there are the even more invidious and threatening possibilities that result from the unconstrained use of
technologies that can destroy the environment required for life. The major transformation brought about by modern
technology is that the consequences of our actions frequently exceed by far anything we can envision. Jonas was
one of the first philosophers to warn us about the unprecedented ethical and political problems that arise with the
rapid development of biotechnology. He claimed that this was happening at a time when there was an "ethical
vacuum," when there did not seem to be any effective ethical principles to limit ot guide our ethical decisions. In
the name of scientific and technological "progress," there is a relentless pressure to adopt a stance where virtually
anything is permissible, includ-ing transforming the genetic structure of human beings, as long as it is "freely
chosen." We need, Jonas argued, a new categorical imperative that might be formulated
as follows: "Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life"; or
expressed negatively: "Act so that the effects of your action are not destructive of the future possibility of such a
life"; or simply: "

Do not compromise the conditions for an indefinite

continuation of humanity on earth "; or again turned positive: "In your

present choices, include the future wholeness of Man among the objects of your will."

Maximizing all lives is the only way to affirm equality

Cummiskey 90

Professor of Philosophy, Bates David, Kantian Consequentialism, Ethics 100.3, p 601-2, p 606,

jstor

It
is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive "overall
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract "social entity."

social good." Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons.
Nozick, for example, argues that "to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a
separate person, that his is the only life he has."30 Why, however, is this not equally true of all those that we do not save through

By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, one
fails to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons,
each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction . In such a situation,
what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of
rational beings, choose? We have a duty to promote the conditions necessary for the
existence of rational beings, but both choosing to act and choosing not to act will cost the life of a rational being. Since
our failure to act?

the basis of Kant's principle is "rational nature exists as an end-in-itself' (GMM, p. 429), the reasonable solution to such a dilemma

If I sacrifice some for the sake

of other rational beings, I do not use them arbitrarily and I do not deny the
unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have "dignity, an unconditional and
incomparable value" that transcends any market value (GMM, p. 436), but, as rational beings, persons also have a
fundamental equality which dictates that some must sometimes give way
for the sake of others. The formula of the end-in-itself thus does not support the view that we may never force
another to bear some cost in order to benefit others. If one focuses on the equal value of all rational beings, then equal
consideration dictates that one sacrifice some to save many . [continues] According to Kant, the
objective end of moral action is the existence of rational beings. Respect for rational beings requires that, in
deciding what to do, one give appropriate practical considerat ion to the
unconditional value of rational beings and to the conditional value of happiness. Since agent-centered constraints
require a non-value-based rationale, the most natural interpretation of the demand that one give equal
respect to all rational beings lead to a consequentialist normative theory. We have seen that there is
involves promoting, insofar as one can, the conditions necessary for rational beings.

no sound Kantian reason for abandoning this natural consequentialist interpretation. In particular, a consequentialist interpretation

it does not involve doing evil so

that good may come of it. It simply requires an uncompromising commitment to the equal
value and equal claims of all rational beings and a recognition that, in the moral consideration of conduct,
one's own subjective concerns do not have overriding importance.
does not require sacrifices which a Kantian ought to consider unreasonable, and

2NC AT: Security

Moralist foreign policymaking only results in intervention
and lashout
Blackwill 14 (Robert D. Blackwill was deputy national-security adviser for
strategic planning and U.S. ambassador to India in the George W. Bush
administration, In Defense of Kissinger, http://nationalinterest.org/article/defensekissinger-9642?page=show, January 2, 2014)

IN HIS BOOK Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger concludes that the United States faces the challenge of reaching its goals in stages, each of which is an amalgam of American values and
geopolitical necessities.1 The recent debates about U.S. military options in Libya and Syria reflect the enduring tension between these intertwined, at times competing components of
our external relations. No U.S. statesman can ignore this dilemma, and none will find it easy to strike exactly the right balance between the two, especially in times of crisis. All would
seek to simultaneously pursue the promotion of the national interest and the protection of human rights. Kissinger, famous for advocating an American foreign policy based on the
national interest, has long stressed that values and power are properly understood as mutually supporting. As he argued in a 1973 speech, since Americans have always held the view

Yet
when policy becomes excessively moralistic it may turn quixotic or
dangerous, giving way to ineffectual posturing or adventuristic
crusades.2 The key to a sustainable foreign policy, in his view, is
the avoidance of either extreme : A country that demands moral
that America stood for something above and beyond its material achievements, a purely pragmatic policy would confuse allies and eventually forfeit domestic support.

perfection of itself as a test of its foreign policy will achieve

neither perfection nor security. 3

This ever-present fusion of American values and national interests was evident in the spring

of 1971, as a crisis erupted in South Asia during Kissingers tenure as Richard Nixons national-security adviser. When the British Raj ended in 1947, a partition of the subcontinent led to
the creation of India and Pakistan as separate, estranged sovereign states. Pakistan, envisioned as a homeland for South Asian Muslims, emerged with an unusual bifurcated structure
comprising two noncontiguous majority-Muslim areas: West Pakistan and East Pakistan. While united by a shared faith, they were divided by language, ethnicity and one thousand
miles of Indian territory. Over the course of a fraught sequence of events from 1970 to 1972, a party advocating East Pakistani autonomy won a national parliamentary majority, and
Pakistans two wings split. Amid natural disaster (a cyclone of historic proportions struck the East on the eve of the vote, killing up to half a million people and devastating fields and
livestock), constitutional crisis, a sweeping crackdown by West Pakistani forces attempting to hold the East, mass refugee migrations, guerilla conflict and an Indian-Pakistani war, East
Pakistan achieved independence as the new state of Bangladesh. By most estimates, the victims of the Bangladeshi independence struggle, which included communal massacres
unleashed during the crackdown, numbered in the hundreds of thousands. In his new book, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, Princeton professor Gary
Bass, who has written previous books on humanitarian intervention and war-crimes tribunals, portrays the American president and his national-security adviser as the heartless villains of
these events. While Bass makes a cursory acknowledgement of the two mens geopolitical accomplishments, he derides the thinking that informed their actions as the product of a
familiar Cold War chessboard. His own implicit framework is a deeply heartfelt and contrary view to Kissingers, one that places human-rights concerns at the pinnacle of U.S. foreign
policy, at least in this crisis. But how persuasive is Basss history? Instead of producing a definitive account, he offers an ahistorical and tendentious rendition that, more often than not,
lacks a broader context. He reduces a complex series of overlapping South Asian upheavals, Cold War alliances and diplomatic initiatives to a reminder of what the world can easily look
like without any concern for the pain of distant strangers.4 He faults the United States for not taking a firmer, more public stand on Pakistans domestic repression while offering only

he trivializes the
possibility that his human rightsdominated policy preferences
could have had profoundly damaging strategic consequences for the
United States. Ironically, in his previous book Freedoms Battle, Bass sympathizes with precisely the sort of cautionary impulses that animated Kissinger:
Even if a president or prime minister has credible information about
atrocities . . . there must still be a cold realpolitik calculation about
the costs of intervening. . . . If a humanitarian intervention would
lead to a broader international crisis, or plunge the countryor the
worldinto a massive war, then most cabinets will decide that it is
just not worth it. . . . Believing in human rights does not make one
suicidal. In fact, he goes even further, allowing that the point of a
balance of powerKissingers principal preoccupation in 1971, as throughout his career as a statesmanis a profound
moral goal: it keeps the peace.5 But in The Blood Telegram, he implies that Nixon and Kissinger should have realized that they
vague assurances that this U.S. pressure would have brought about an actual improvement in conditions. Moreover,

could have had it both ways with no riskachieved their strategic breakthrough with China, with all of its attendant geopolitical benefits, and concurrently put human rights in East
Pakistan at the top of their policy agenda. If only life were that simple: as Kissinger observes, The analyst runs no risk. If his conclusions prove wrong, he can write another treatise. The
statesman is permitted only one guess; his mistakes are irretrievable.6 Thus, at a time of acute crisis, Kissinger judged that if Washington had mounted an all-out private and public
human-rights campaign against then president Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan and the Pakistan government, which was correctly convinced that the future of the state was at stake, such
a campaign would not have fundamentally altered Islamabads policy toward East Pakistan, and the White Houses China initiative could well have collapsed. However, as will be
demonstrated at length later in this essay, that hardly meant that he ignored the plight of the Bengali Hindus. Kissinger, both while in office and in his subsequent writings, rejected the
proposition that circumstances inevitably force a crude either/or choice between national interests and democratic values, and during this crisis no other nation except India did as much
as the United States to directly address the human-rights tragedy in East Pakistan. One wishes that the chasm between academic and policy-maker perspectives might have produced a
certain modesty in Basss treatment of these events. Unfortunately, it doesnt. Instead The Blood Telegram offers a strident, almost willfully biased attack on the personal motives of
policy makers whom Bass condemnsfrom the comfortable perspective of forty years of hindsight and an American victory in the Cold Warfor falling short of bringing about all
desirable goals simultaneously. In Basss theory, Nixon and Kissinger, motivated by a mixture of racial animus toward Indians, indifference to human rights and an obsessive focus on

Cold War geopolitics, ignored opportunities to save lives, ensured that the United States was allied with the killers and incurred responsibility for a significant complicity in the
slaughter of the Bengalis.7 To reach his indictment of Nixon and Kissinger, Bass pairs a myopic account of the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China and its long-term objectives with a
highly selective rendition of U.S. policy toward the breakup of Pakistan. IT IS IMPORTANT to stress what Nixon and Kissinger were trying to accomplish in U.S.-Chinese relations beginning
in the fall of 1970: no less than a fundamental restructuring of the global balance of power and world order in Americas favor. By establishing a strategic understanding with Beijing
based on Chinas genuine worry that the relentless Soviet military buildup in the Far East could presage an attack on China, they hoped to strengthen Americas global position; meet
Beijings test that only an America that was strong in Asia could be taken seriously by the Chinese8; incentivize Moscow to adopt more reasonable policies toward the United States,
including in Europe and on arms control; bring an honorable end to the Vietnam War (a conflict in which half a million Americans were at war at the time of Nixons inauguration, but
which public and elite opinion increasingly rejected); and reduce tensions throughout Asia. All these crucial objectivesin which success could fairly count as both a strategic and a
moral achievementrequired a fundamental reorientation of U.S.-Chinese relations. As Kissinger observes in White House Years, The hostility between China and the Soviet Union
served our purposes best if we maintained closer relations with each side than they did with each other. The rest could be left to the dynamic of events.9 Nixon and Kissingers decision
in October 1970 (before the Pakistani crisis) to reach out to China through the Pakistanis is casually dismissed by Bass as one of many options and potentially the worst. He suggests
France and, curiously, totalitarian Romania as plausible and more ethical alternatives.10 Yet the United States explored all three, and Beijing unambiguously chose Pakistan. The first
explicit indication by China that a personal envoy of Nixon would be welcome in Beijing came in December 1970 by way of the Pakistani channel, with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai
stressing, The United States knows that Pakistan is a great friend of China and therefore we attach importance to the message.11 On April 27, 1971, after American replies through
both Romania and Pakistan, Beijing followed up through Islamabad and invited direct discussions between high-level responsible persons of the two countries, suggesting that the
proper arrangements could be made through the good offices of President Yahya Khan.12 As Kissinger stresses, Zhou did not want to risk subordinates thwarting of our common
design by their haggling over modalities. By keeping technical arrangements in the Pakistani channel, he ensured discretion, high-level consideration, and expeditious decisions.13
Bass, ignoring the evident Chinese insistence on Pakistan, attacks the White Houses use of Yahya Khan as an intermediary as evidence of a gratuitous Nixonian affection for military
strongmen. In addition to the strong PRC preference for Pakistan and the advantages of geographic proximity, another explanation is also pertinent: it is difficult to imagine how it could
have been arranged for Kissinger to visit Beijing secretly from either Paris (a world capital) or Bucharest (a prime target of Soviet penetration); secrecy was an essential requirement
since Nixon could risk neither premature U.S. domestic euphoria nor a public failure in Beijing. Nothing regarding this highly sensitive matter leaked from Pakistan, and Yahya Khan
discreetly managed the complex arrangements to get Kissinger secretly from Islamabad to Beijing, as Zhou had suggested. The late great Harvard historian Ernest May once observed,
What a historian chooses to leave out or minimize is often as important and telling as what he decides to include.14 One must wonder if Bass discounts the clear Chinese preference
for Yahya Khan as the intermediary between Beijing and Washington because acknowledging it would undermine one of his core assertions: that Nixon and Kissinger could have openly
condemned or even attempted to unseat the Pakistani president without endangering the opening to China. In his book, Bass never directly confronts a series of major questions: If he
knew that the opening to China would have faltered, as Nixon and Kissinger feared, because of U.S. pressure on Yahya over the atrocities in East Pakistan, would he nevertheless have
forced a showdown with Pakistan over the plight of Hindu Bengalis? Would he have been content to face an outcome in which the China initiative collapsed even as Pakistan rejected
American demands as irrelevant? Would the next step have been sanctions against Pakistan, or perhaps American support for the Bengali insurgencyand what other results would
these policies have entailed? Statesmen have to make such choices; professors do not. To duck these questions, Bass must implicitly posit an alternative rosy scenario in which Nixon
and Kissinger are able to establish an equally effective channel to Beijing while bringing about a swift improvement in Pakistans domestic conditions. But what would the Chinese
reaction have been if the United States had informed an adversary of two decades at an enormously delicate moment that its watershed invitation to improve relations had been
misdirected and that the Yahya Khan channel was unacceptable to Washington? What if those within the Chinese government who had wished to sabotage the possibility of an opening
to the United States had used this U.S. switch in channels to delay Kissingers visit? Who could have known how long Zhou would be in a sufficiently strong bureaucratic position to
pursue a breakthrough with Washington? (In fact, just two years later, he was struggled against by ultraleftists and purged.) Who could have been sure that Mao Zedong, always
mercurial and then in exceedingly poor health, would not reverse course and seek to solve his Soviet problem through rapprochement with Moscow? And what conclusions might Beijing
have drawn regarding American credibility if Nixon and Kissinger, as Bass advises, had dramatically changed course and abandoned a longtime ally during the defining crisis of its
independent existence? AS NIXON AND KISSINGER had warned, the crisis in East Pakistan produced escalating Indian-Pakistani tensions, which culminated in war in December 1971.
India, backed by a freshly signed Indo-Soviet friendship treaty with military clauses and an active Soviet supply line, crushed Pakistani forces in East Pakistan and recognized Bangladesh
as an independent state. Pressing their advantage, top Indian officials considered objectives in West Pakistan including a total destruction of Pakistani military power and (as Bass himself
notes) other ways to crack up West Pakistan itself.15 This outcome could have inaugurated an ominous precedent in international orderthe destruction of a sovereign state by foreign
military actionwith consequences that would reverberate far beyond the immediate humanitarian crisis. If India succeeded, Kissinger warned during the crisis: The result would be a
nation of 100 million people dismembered, their political structure changed by military attack, despite a treaty of alliance with and private assurances by the United States. And all the
other countries, on whom we have considered we could rely . . . would know that this has been done by the weight of Soviet arms and with Soviet diplomatic support. What will be the
effect in the Middle East, for examplecould we tell Israel that she should give up something along a line from A to B, in return for something else, with any plausibility?16 And how
would China have reacted if Washington had stood by passively and watched Beijings chosen channel to the United States and longtime friend crushed by a combination of Indian
military action and Soviet weapons? What then for Maos willingness to pursue the opening of U.S.-Chinese relations? Seeking to deter such a destructive outcome, the United States
deployed an aircraft carrier to the Bay of Bengal (where it was joined by a Soviet naval task force deployed from Vladivostok) and pushed for an immediate UN-backed cease-fire. With
military aid to Pakistan frozen, the White House encouraged allies to make shows of force, including a back-channel proposal in which Iran and Jordan would transfer some of their own
American-made fighter jets to the West Pakistan front. Bass expresses indignation at this proposal, suggesting that it was undertaken to assist in the repression of civilians in East
Pakistan. He fails to explain that the discussion involved transferring jets to West Pakistan during a war in which India was considering a drive for total victory and an all-out destruction
of the Pakistani armed forces. In any case, it is not apparent what military role, if any, the planes played in the conflict.17 In Basss view, these actions constituted a perverse betrayal of
democratic principles by Nixon and KissingerAmerican participation in Kissingers secret onslaught and an arsenal against democracy that drove India into the arms of the Soviet
Union and enduringly alienat[ed] not just Indira Gandhi . . . but a whole democratic society.18 But this insults the sophistication and agency of the main Indian players, in addition to
misrepresenting the actual sequence of events. Scholars will long marvel at how the worlds two largest democracies ended up on opposite sides of the Cold War. Yet their rift was
growing well before the 1971 Pakistan crisis, and it transcended Richard Nixon and Indira Gandhis mutual personal dislike. Negotiations over the Indo-Soviet friendship treaty had begun
by March 1969, when the Soviet defense minister brought a draft treaty text to New Delhi. A draft text was ready by mid-1970, though by some Indian accounts its signing was
postponed pending the Indian election. According to one Indian participant in the negotiations, all that remained to be negotiated at this point was the final wording of the decisive
military clause.19 The 1971 crisis did strain U.S.-Indian relationsyet this was largely because Washington and New Delhi had incompatible strategic aspirations. Washington
increasingly accepted that East Pakistan would become autonomous or independent, but opposed an outcome in which this was achieved through a regional war or with Soviet arms.
India, pursuing a sophisticated blend of humanitarian impulses and Machiavellian calculation, opted almost immediately for a military solution. As Bass himself notes, On March 2, over
three weeks before Yahya launched his slaughter, [Indira] Gandhi ordered her best and brightest . . . to evaluate giving help to Bangla Desh and the possibility of recognizing an
independent Bangla Desh. Bengali partisans, she assessed, would need aircraft for quick movement inside India around the borders of Bangla Desh and arms and ammunition
(including L[ight] M[achine] G[un]s, M[edium] M[achine] G[uns] and Mortarsin other words, Indian military support for a cross-border separatist insurgency.20 At the beginning of April
1971, Indira Gandhi reportedly told her cabinet that we dont mind a war and ordered the Indian army to prepare for an invasion of East Pakistan. According to one high-ranking Indian
officer quoted by Bass, she ordered them to move in immediately. When the army balked at invading a flood plain on the eve of a monsoon, a compromise solution was reached: Indian
conventional forces would prepare to enter East Pakistan around the fifteenth of November, and in the meantime India would provide Bengali separatists with material assistance
and training in guerilla tactics, to prepare for a long struggle.21 Bengali guerilla unitsorganized, trained and armed by Indiaoperated from border sanctuaries throughout the
summer and fall, backed up by occasional Indian firepower and at least one cross-border Indian raid.22 The United Statesincluding Kissinger, in his trip to New Delhi in July 1971, and
Nixon, during his November summit with Indira Gandhipressed India to refrain from provocations on the border and argued that war would be best avoided if all parties committed to a
peaceful political track. India, convinced that it had both a moral obligation and a historic strategic opportunity to act, denied its covert assistance to the Bengali insurgency and insisted
that the problem was Pakistans to solve. Indira Gandhi refused American requests to send U.S. or UN observers to help administer refugee aid (in retrospect, most likely because two
ambitious Indian programs were proceeding simultaneously among the refugee populationone humanitarian and the other covert). Each democracy could claim to have achieved a
significant portion of its goals. While welcoming and feeding millions of refugees, India succeeded in splitting East and West Pakistan by force and emerging as the midwife of an
independent Bangladesh. The United States, after attempting to head off a war through both humanitarian measures and diplomacy, successfully deterred a major Indian campaign
against West Pakistan while preserving its course of rapprochement with China and dtente with the Soviet Union. COINCIDING WITH these events was a violent internal crisis in
Pakistan. On March 25, 1971, after the collapse of compromise talks between East and West Pakistani politicians, Pakistani forces began Operation Searchlight, a systematic plan to
eliminate all resistance in East Pakistan through an overwhelming application of force. This occurred just as Nixon and Kissinger were awaiting a definitive reply from China to messages
sent that winter through Pakistan and Romania concerning a prospective high-level bilateral meeting in Beijing (a reply that arrived in April through the Pakistani channel). In Basss
account, an obsessive and unwarranted desire to preserve Pakistan as a conduit for the unfolding U.S.-Chinese rapprochement translated into a green light for [Yahya Khans] killing
campaign.23 In this version of events, the opening to China, while an epochal event, was done at the cost of American complicity in genocide, as the Bengalis became collateral
damage for realigning the global balance of power.24 This incendiary accusation confuses both the order of events and the ability of governments to bring about rapid changes in other
states internal practices. To blame the White House for failing to secure a peaceful outcome to the winter 1971 East-West Pakistan political impasse, as Bass doesmuch less to equate
this failure with complicity in genocidesets the bar illogically high. The results of the 1970 election raised fundamental questions about Pakistans viability as a unified state. The
militaryalready amply armed and equipped by China, France, the Soviet Union and the United States under Nixons predecessorsunsurprisingly declared its refusal to abide an EastWest split. Would preemptively threatening to cut off aid have moderated the generals in charge of managing the transition to democracy, or reinforced a sense of siege?25 Bass never
seriously considers whether, given Pakistans existing geographic, ethnic and political divisions, the United States could have prevented its two wings slide toward violent dissolution.26
In their widely respected study War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladeshbased on interviews with Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi participants in these
eventsscholars Richard Sisson and Leo Rose assessed that the American capacity to shape events within Pakistan at this time was, in fact, limited: The question remains whether Yahya
would have responded to a strong public condemnation of the crackdown by moderating his repressive policy in East Pakistan. The general consensus, even among the critics in the
government, was probably not. Projected U.S. military and economic aid to Pakistan in 1971 was not of a magnitude to provide Washington with much leverage to pressure the
leadership in Rawalpindi to change policies in East Pakistan to avoid the loss of aid. . . . By 1971 Washington lacked much clout in Rawalpindi, particularly on issues that, in West
Pakistani eyes, struck at the very basis of their national existence.27 On the particular issue of American arms transfers to Pakistan, the total U.S. cutoff of the long-term weapons
pipeline (which in any case was exceedingly modest) predictably had no appreciable effect on the ethnic-cleansing actions of the Pakistani army in East Pakistan. As we have seen
recently with respect to Egypt, such U.S. punishing actions have a poor record of actually influencing foreign governments that believe that they are fighting for the fundamental future
of their countries. Even so, Bass has scoured the record for coarse quotations to back his biased and incendiary charges, sidestepping (and seeming purposefully to avoid) ample
evidence that Nixon and Kissinger pursued a far more balanced and constructive courseone in which the United States emerged as the leading donor and organizer of East Pakistans
cyclone relief; provided hundreds of thousands of tons of grain and extensive emergency supplies and financial assistance to prevent a famine in East Pakistan and among refugees in
India; attempted through diplomacy and pressure to avert an Indian-Pakistani conflict; and then, when war broke out, pressed for an early UN-sponsored cease-fire to prevent the fighting
from encompassing West Pakistan. All this was achieved while carrying out a historic opening to China and ultimately promoting dtente with the Soviet Union, which backed India during
the conflict. It takes an obsessively strained reading to find in this record, as Bass does, one of the worst moments of moral blindness in U.S. foreign policy.28 Much of the force of
Basss narrative derives from vivid, often-inflammatory quotations from the Nixon tapes, and there is no shortage of those. No crass Nixon statement or sarcastic aside seems to have
gone unquoted. Yet presidential vulgarity was hardly a Nixon innovation. Dwight Eisenhower swore like the trooper he was. At a 1953 summit with Winston Churchill, Eisenhower
dismissed Churchills advice to engage the post-Stalin Soviet leadership, stating (as Churchills private secretary recorded) that Russia was a woman of the streets and whether her

dress was new, or just the old one patched, it was certainly the same whore underneath. America intended to drive her off her present beat into the back streets.29 Lyndon Johnson
once pressed a point with the Greek ambassador as follows: F*** your Parliament and your Constitution, America is an elephant, Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea.30 In short, Bass
appears to be curiously offended that conversations in the Oval Office are often not the stuff of a church social. FURTHERMORE, BASS'S treatment of some sources suggests that he has
privileged outrage over accuracy. For example, he recounts a July 30, 1971, Senior Review Group meeting convened to discuss American policy in South Asia as follows: In a Situation
Room meeting, Kissinger defended the presidents man. Were not out of gas with Yahya, he said. Yahya will be reasonable. He preferred to be gentle with Yahya, not hectoring or
squeezing him. When a State Department official suggested getting the army out of running East Pakistan, Kissinger stood up for Pakistans sovereignty: Why is it our business to tell
the Pakistanis how to run their government?31 Heartless realpolitik? Not quite. No reader of Basss account would guess that Kissinger was actually discussing how to resolve a refugee
crisis and deliver emergency American food aid to the Bengali population. Responding to the argument that a push for political reconciliation should precede further humanitarian
assistance, Kissinger argued that the threat of a famine was too urgent: Were not out of gas with Yahya. I think he will do a lot of things that are reasonable if we concentrate on the
refugee problem. One thing he will not do is talk to the Awami League, at least not as an institution. He might talk to some League leaders as individuals.32 The immediate focus,
Kissinger insisted, should be on providing food aid: On famine relief, we must get a program started under any and all circumstances. If famine develops, it will generate another major
outflow of refugees. This is one thing we can do something about. I think we can get considerable Pakistani cooperation on this. . . . But the famine will start in October. Under the best
possible scenario, political accommodation will have barely begun in October.33 As for a colleagues argument that the United States should take [the Pakistani army] out of the civil
administration because a civilian presence would encourage refugees to return, Kissinger asked: We can appropriately ask them for humanitarian behavior, but can we tell them how to
run things?34 The United States, he argued, was better off dealing with an existing government and insisting that it accept American food relief and logistical guidance: If we are faced
with a huge famine and a huge new refugee outflow in October and were still debating political accommodation, well have a heluva lot to answer for. We need an emergency relief plan
and we need to tell Yahya that this is what has to be done to get the supplies delivered. Yahya will be reasonable.35 None of this discussion emerges in the Bass account, which splices
out-of-context quotations to recast a discussion of emergency humanitarian assistance into a scene of careless indifference to suffering. Similar misrepresentations recur throughout the
book. Bass also glosses over the action points decided upon in the meeting, which included agreement to prepare a comprehensive relief program for East Pakistan, including what has
already been moved and where the bottlenecks are as well as a telegram, to be approved by the President, outlining an approach to Yahya telling him what needs to be done on
refugees, food relief, etc.36 Even as delicate diplomacy unfolded, Nixon and Kissinger made repeated appeals to the Pakistani military to moderate its domestic practices and seek
political compromise. In May 1971, Nixon wrote to Yahya Khan pressing him to keep the peace with India and honor his pledges of a transition to civilian governance. Nixon warned that
this was both a humanitarian matter and a strategic imperative: I have also noted with satisfaction your public declaration of amnesty for the refugees and commitment to transfer
power to elected representatives. I am confident that you will turn these statements into reality. I feel sure you will agree with me that the first essential step is to bring an end to the
civil strife and restore peaceful conditions in East Pakistan. . . . It is absolutely vital for the maintenance of peace in the Subcontinent to restore conditions in East Pakistan conducive to
the return of refugees from Indian territory as quickly as possible.37 The same week, the American ambassador, Joseph Farland (a political appointee who was personally close to Nixon),
met with Yahya Khan in Karachi and told him that the first necessity was to stop the shooting and to start the rebuilding.38 Citing reports from Dacca of atrocities and attacks on East
Pakistans Hindu minority, Farland warned that without the creation of normal conditions in the East, a renewed sense of physical security among the Hindu community, and a patent
movement with substance behind it toward a peaceful political accommodation . . . the refugee problem will continue. A continuation of the present course would produce an
escalation of Indo-Pak tensions and increasing anti-Pakistani sentiment in the United States. Farland concluded his conversation by urging Khan to state publicly his commitment to
effect political reconciliation.39 Two weeks later Farland met again with Yahya Khan and reiterated these points in sharper terms. As he cabled back to Washington: I went on to note
that the flow of refugees continued and that this flow is symptomatic of the serious situation in East Pakistan. I pointed out that the Embassy continued to receive reports of Hindu
villages being attacked by the army, that fear is pervasive, and that until this situation changes the refugees will continue to cross over into India. And I reiterated the U[nited] S[tates]
G[overnment]s concern that at some point the Hindu exodus, if not checked, could lead to a military clash with India. Farland admonished Khan that a heavy responsibility still rests on
Pakistan: One could hardly expect the flow to cease until the level of military activity by the army is reduced and repressive measures against the local population, especially the
Hindus, was ended.40 These warnings continued even during Kissingers landmark secret trip to Beijing in July 1971. In Rawalpindi, on the eve of his unannounced departure for a
country where no American diplomat had been for two decades, Kissinger admonished Pakistans foreign secretary that 7 million refugees are an intolerable burden. They overload an
already overburdened Indian economy, particularly in eastern India. The Indians see enormous danger of communal riots. Unless Pakistan could chart a path back to normal
administration and a peaceful return of refugees, the likely result would be a military confrontation which the Indians feel they would win.41 Warning that a failure to improve
domestic conditions would result in a catastrophic defeat by a historic adversary hardly counts as soft-pedaling the issue. This issue of private U.S. admonitions versus public
condemnations of other governments is, of course, familiar. Similar questions have loomed over Americas recent attempts to moderate political upheavals in friendly countries such as
Bahrain and Egypt (both with American-trained and -supplied armed forces responding, at times brutally, to what they regarded as existential internal crises). But these are policy
dilemmas, not crimes. Under Basss definition of complicity with atrocities, few practitioners of American foreign policy would escape unindicted. THE FACT that the partition of Pakistan
in 1971 involved such catastrophic loss of human life must count among the second half of the twentieth centurys greatest tragedies. But Basss policy prescriptions seem likely to have
brought about the worst possible outcomesa delay, if not a rupture, in the U.S. opening to China; no easing of the tragic plight of the Hindu Bengalis; and potentially even the complete
disintegration of the Pakistani state itself, sending arms, trained fighters and another round of refugees into already-unstable South Asia and setting a dangerous precedent for other
regional conflicts. Fortunately, none of this happened. In White House Years, Kissinger observes, The character of leaders is tested by their willingness to persevere in the face of

Nixon and Kissinger surely met that

test during the South Asia crisis of 1971. Their geopolitical
approach, which Bass derides, produced an extraordinarily
productive Nixon visit to China in February 1972 and the signing of
the Shanghai Communiqu, which serves as the basic framework for
the two countries relations to this day; a broad, bipartisan U.S.
policy approach to China that has lasted for more than forty years
and has promoted peace and stability throughout Asia; major U.S.Chinese intelligence cooperation against the USSR; and a May 1972
Nixon-Brezhnev summit in Moscow that saw the signing of the AntiBallistic Missile Treaty, the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and
the U.S.-Soviet incidents-at-sea agreement, all hallmarks of a
dtente that reduced the risk of superpower confrontation even
while creating conditions that helped undermine the Soviet Unions
moral and geopolitical claims and bring about its destruction. Bass would have
uncertainty and to build for a future they can neither demonstrate nor fully discern.42

readers believe that all these historic U.S. foreign-policy accomplishments were written in the stars, irrespective of U.S. policy toward Pakistan in 1971and that only grotesque
callousness prevented Nixon and Kissinger from adding an abject capitulation by the Pakistani government and a consequent radical transformation of Islamabads human-rights record
to their tally of achievements. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that mans most enduring stupidity is forgetting what he is trying to do. We should be grateful that Richard Nixon and Henry
Kissinger did not forget what they were trying to do during this crisis regarding China, the Soviet Union, South Asia and the global balance of power.

High magnitude, low probability scenario planning (like

nuclear war) is productive in IR
Timothy Junio 13, cybersecurity postdoctoral fellow at CISAC, PhD in political
science from the University of Pennsylvania, and Thomas Mahnken, Naval War
College, Conceiving of Future War: The Promise of Scenario Analysis for

International Relations, September, International Studies Review Volume 15, Issue

3, pages 374395

This introduces political scientists to scenarios future

counterfactuals and demonstrates their value
across a
wide range of research questions
scenarios
contribute to theory building and development , identifying new
article

in tandem with other methodologies and

. The authors describe best practices regarding the scenario method and argue that

hypotheses , analyzing data-poor research topics , articulating

world views , setting new research agendas , avoiding cognitive
biases , and teaching
the low rate at which scenarios are
used in the international relations subfield and situates scenarios in
the broader context of political science methods

social scientists often have a hard

time [building scenarios]; they have been trained to stay away from
what if? questions and concentrate on what was?
Scenarioscounterfactual
narratives about the futureare woefully underutilized among
political scientists
The low rate at which political scientists use scenarios
is surprising; the method is popular
. The article also establishes

. The conclusion offers two detailed examples of the effective use of

scenarios.

In his classic work on scenario analysis, The Art of the Long View, Peter Schwartz commented that

(Schwartz 1996:31). While Schwartz's comments were

impressionistic based on his years of conducting and teaching scenario analysis, his claim withstands empirical scrutiny.

. The method is almost never taught on graduate student syllabi, and a survey of leading international relations (IR) journals indicates that scenarios were used in only 302

of 18,764 sampled articles.

less than 2% of

the time

in fields as disparate as business, demographics, ecology, pharmacology, public health, economics,

and epidemiology (Venable, Li, Ginter, and Duncan 1993; Leufkens, Haaijer-Ruskamp, Bakker, and Dukes 1994; Baker, Hulse, Gregory, White, Van Sickle, Berger, Dole, and Schumaker 2004; Sanderson, Scherbov, O'Neill, and Lutz

Scenarios also are a common tool employed by the policymakers

whom political scientists study. This seeks to elevate the status of
scenarios in political science by demonstrating their usefulness for
2004).

article

theory building and pedagogy . Rather than constitute mere

speculation regarding an unpredictable future
scenarios
assist scholars with developing testable hypotheses
, as critics might suggest,

, gathering data, and identifying a theory's upper and

scenarios are an effective way to teach students to apply

theory to policy
political scientists have invoked the scenario method to
improve the specifications of their theories, propose falsifiable
hypotheses, and design new empirical research programs.

What do counterfactual narratives about the future look like?

One of the most common uses
is
to study the conditions under which high-consequence , lowlower bounds. Additionally,

. In the pages below, a best practices guide is offered to advise scholars, practitioners, and students, and an argument is developed in favor of the use of scenarios. The article

concludes with two examples of how

Scenarios in the Discipline

Scenarios may range in

length from a few sentences to many pages.

of the scenario method, which will be referenced throughout this article,

probability events may occur. Perhaps the best example of this is

nuclear warfare , a circumstance that has never resulted, but has
captivated generations of political scientists.
consider a
scenario regarding how a first use of a nuclear weapon might
occur
For an introductory illustration, let us

very

simple

During the year 2023, the US military is ordered to launch air and sea patrols of the Taiwan Strait to aid in a crisis. These highly visible patrols disrupt trade off China's coast, and result in skyrocketing insurance

rates for shipping companies. Several days into the contingency, which involves over ten thousand US military personnel, an intelligence estimate concludes that a Chinese conventional strike against US air patrols and naval assets
is imminent. The United States conducts a preemptive strike against anti-air and anti-sea systems on the Chinese mainland. The US strike is far more successful than Chinese military leaders thought possible; a new source of
intelligence to the United Statesunknown to Chinese leadershipallowed the US military to severely degrade Chinese targeting and situational awareness capabilities. Many of the weapons that China relied on to dissuade
escalatory US military action are now reduced to single-digit-percentage readiness. Estimates for repairs and replenishments are stated in terms of weeks, and China's confidence in readily available, but dumber, weapons is low
due to the dispersion and mobility of US forces. Word of the successful US strike spreads among the Chinese and Taiwanese publics. The Chinese Government concludes that for the sake of preserving its domestic strength, and to
signal resolve to the US and Taiwanese Governments while minimizing further economic disruption, it should escalate dramatically with the use of an extremely small-yield nuclear device against a stationary US military asset in the

reflects a future event that, while unlikely to occur

contains many dimensions of political science theory .
These include
what leaders perceive as limited,
proportional, or escalatory uses of force; the importance of
information about capabilities
the relationship
between military expediency and political objectives during war;
and the role of compressed timelines for decision making
The
purpose
is to explain to scholars how such stories, and more
rigorously developed narratives that specify variables of interest
and draw on extant data, may improve the study of IR .
Pacific region.

This

short story

and far too

vague to be used for military planning,

the following:

private

and commitment; audience costs in international politics;

, among others.

of this article

An important starting point is to explain how

future counterfactuals fit into the methodological canon of the discipline.

Our risk assessment critical to transforming the public sphere

leads to democratic decision making
Borraz, 2007 [OLIVIER BORRAZ Centre de Sociologie des Organisations,
Sciences Po-CNRS, Paris, Risk and Public Problems, Journal of Risk Research, 10, 7,
Oct 2007, 941-957]

risk is a way of framing a public problem in

such a way as to politicize the search for solutions. This politicization entails, in
These studies seem to suggest that

particular, a widening of the range of stakeholders, a reference to broader political issues and debates, the search
for new decision- making processes (either in terms of democratization, or renewed scientific expertise), and the
explicit mobilization of non-scientific arguments in these processes. But if this is the case, then it could also be true
that risk is simply one way of framing public problems. Studies in the 1990s, in particular, showed that a whole
range of social problems (e.g., poverty, housing, unemployment) had been reframed as health issues, with the
result that their management was transferred from social workers to health professionals, and in the process was

Studies of risk, on the contrary, seem to

suggest that similar social problems could well be re-politicized, i.e.,
described in neutral, depoliticized terms (Fassin, 1998).

taken up by new social movements, producing and using alternative scientific data, calling for more deliberative
decision-making procedures, and clearly intended to promote change in the manner in which the state protects the
population against various risks (health and environment, but also social and economic). In other words,

framing public problems as risks could afford an opportunity for a

transformation in the political debate, from more traditional
cleavages around social and economic issues, to rifts stemming
from antagonistic views of science, democracy and the world order .

2NC Ext #2 -- VTL =/= OW

Existence precedes the ability to ascribe value [and respect
the other]
Wapner 3
Paul Wapner. 2003. Associate Prof. and Dir. Global Envt. Policy Prog. American U., Dissent, Leftist criticism of
nature, Winter, 50:1.
All attempts to listen to nature are social constructions--except one .

Even the most radical

postmodernist must acknowledge the distinction between physical
existence and nonexistence. As I have said, postmodernists accept that there is a physical
substratum to the phenomenal world even if they argue about the different meanings we ascribe to it. This

We can't ascribe meaning to that which

doesn't appear. What doesn't exist can manifest no character. Put differently,
acknowledgment of physical existence is crucial.

yes, the postmodernist should rightly worry about interpreting nature's expressions. And all of us should be wary of
those who claim to speak on nature's behalf (including environmentalists who do that). But we need not doubt the

a prerequisite of expression is existence. This in turn suggests that

preserving the nonhuman world-in all its diverse embodiments-must be
seen by eco-critics as a fundamental good. Eco-critics must be supporters, in some fashion, of
simple idea that

environmental preservation. Postmodernists reject the idea of a universal good. They rightly acknowledge the
difficulty of identifying a common value given the multiple contexts of our value-producing activity. In fact, if there
is one thing they vehemently scorn, it is the idea that there can be a value that stands above the individual
contexts of human experience. Such a value would present itself as a metanarrative and, as Jean Francois Lyotard
has explained, postmodernism is characterized fundamentally by its "incredulity toward meta-narratives."
Nonetheless, I can't see how postmodern critics can do otherwise than accept the value of preserving the
nonhuman world. The nonhuman is the extreme "other"; it stands in contradistinction to humans as a species. In
understanding the constructed quality of human experience and the dangers of reification, postmodernism

respect must involve

ensuring that the "other" actually continues to exist. In our day and age, this
requires us to take responsibility for protecting the actuality of the
nonhuman. Instead, however, we are running roughshod over the earth's diversity of plants, animals, and
inherently advances an ethic of respecting the "other." At the very least,

ecosystems. Postmodern critics should find this particularly disturbing. If they don't, they deny their own intellectual
insights and compromise their fundamental moral commitment.

2NC Ext #3 -- FoD Good

Death must be prevented
Paterson 3 - Department of Philosophy, Providence College, Rhode Island Craig,
A Life Not Worth Living?, Studies in Christian Ethics, SAGE
Contrary to those accounts, I would argue that

objective evil

it is death

per se

that is really the

for us, not because it deprives us of a prospective future of overall good judged better than

the alternative of non-being. It cannot be about harm to a former person who has ceased to exist, for no person

death in itself is an evil to us

because it ontologically destroys the current existent subject it is
the ultimate in metaphysical lightening strikes. 80 The evil of death is
truly an ontological evil borne by the person who already exists,
independently of calculations about better or worse possible lives.
Such an evil need not be consciously experienced in order to be an
evil for the kind of being a human person is. Death is an evil
because of the change in kind it brings about, a change that is
destructive of the type of entity that we essentially are. Anything,
whether caused naturally or caused by human intervention (intentional or unintentional) that drastically
interferes in the process of maintaining the person in existence is
an objective evil for the person. What is crucially at stake here, and is dialectically supportive
of the self-evidency of the basic good of human life, is that death is a radical interference
with the current life process of the kind of being that we are . In
consequence, death itself can be credibly thought of as a primitive evil
for all persons, regardless of the extent to which they are currently
or prospectively capable of participating in a full array of the goods
of life. 81 In conclusion, concerning willed human actions, it is justifiable to state that
any intentional rejection of human life itself cannot therefore be
warranted since it is an expression of an ultimate disvalue for the
subject, namely, the destruction of the present person; a radical
ontological good that we cannot begin to weigh objectively against
the travails of life in a rational manner. To deal with the sources of
disvalue (pain, suffering, etc.) we should not seek to irrationally destroy the
actually suffers from the sub-sequent non-participation. Rather ,

person , the very source and condition of all human possibility.

Death doesnt key to VTL

Erik Ringmar 96, London School of Economics, On the Ontological Status of the
State, http://www.ringmar.net/writings/Erik%20Ringmar,%20On%20the
%20Ontological%20Status%20of%20the%20State.pdf
apocalyptic talk is, however, not in itself evidence of the end of subjectivity. In fact the
very opposite conclusion could be drawn . It should, after all, not surprise us that an ontology based on
Such loose

The end is, after all, what makes

the story possible in the first place, and by envisioning this end we make stories
make sense. This kind of envisioning is, I would argue, precisely what the discussion regarding 'the end of subjectivity' is all
about. There is, in other words, a fundamental, yet highly ambiguous relationship between the end of
the stories we tell about ourselves death and the meanings we attach to
our lives. On the one hand, death means the destruction of our selves.
narratives will be profoundly preoccupied with endings (Kermode, 1966: 93-124).

When our story is over we will no longer be, and for this reason death constantly threatens to make every moment of the story
leading up to it lose its meaning. Death may terrify us for the simple reason that we never will be in a position to tell the story of
what it was like to go through it. Death cannot be emasculated through narrative since death is the end of the narrative.

On

the other hand, however, death is also a prerequisite of all stories. The story
would not be if it did not end somewhere, and thus we the subjects who appear
in, and through, it would not be either. This does not mean that death is the
meaning of life, but it does mean that death makes a meaningful life possible. We
constantly need to envision the end of our story since only the end can make sense
of, and give legitimacy to, the present. This is true not only for our individual but also for our collective
selves, and it explains why politics needs its Utopias and why intellectuals constantly
prophesy the end of this, that or the other . Will subjectivity, then, ever come to a final end? Will individual
and collective selves one day no longer be? Perhaps, perhaps not. What is certain, however, is that while the content that we give to
our selves the plots that we construct about our lives will change dramatically in the future just as they have changed
dramatically in the past, a self will exist as long as stories are told about it. To envision an end to these stories is a crucial part of
what it means to understand a story and as such a prerequisite of subjectivity which in fact has very little to do with its eventual
demise.

Fear of death doesnt cause lashout

Langford 3 (Ian, Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global
Environment School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia and
University College London, AN EXISTENTIAL APPROACH TO RISK PERCEPTION)

other perspectives on risk perception can be

gained by examining underlying existential anxieties, and existential analysis
The above case studies show that

between widely differing risk issues and across very different

methodologies . Existential analysis is, of course, only one of a number of theoretical and practical

can provide a link

approaches that can be taken towards risks, but it is potentially

capable of transcending the

difference between cultures and histories . Whilst the challenges

and risks posed by living today in a techno-logically advanced society are
very different from those faced a thousand years ago in the same
geographical locations, the existential anxieties remain the same, as
they are a common property of being human , although coping
strategies may change somewhat. Millenium anxiety in 1999 was not so different from that
displayed in 999 AD. Further, existential analysis can reflect on the societal
challenges posed by modern risks as well as the individual
adaptations required in order to survive in the 21st century.

Giddens

(1991) links existential anxiety to loss of trust, and Beck (1999) comments on how the World Risk Society brings
people together as well as separating them though the operation of the global political economy. There are winners
and losers, but

all are beginning to play on the same field.

Although cross-cultural

comparisons are not the focus of this paper, it is worth mentioning that from research conducted in the UK, and also
in Greece (Kontogianni et al., 2001), it is possible to see the commonalities between at least these two cultures, as
well as the differences. With regard to risks, respondents in the UK generally took a more individualistic personal
specialness approach, for example, in the research on perceptions of climate change, whilst in Greece respondents
still held more belief in the divine order of things. Greek respondents often expressed a belief in (theopronia), which has no direct English translation, but can be interpreted as meaning that if you do the right thing,
God will give you luck. So, for example, if you fish according to natural laws, God will make sure the fish dont run
out.....in general, Greeks favoured the ultimate rescuer defense. In terms of the World Risk Society, and
individual coping mechanisms, it appears that death anxiety is particularly prevalent when people consider their
fears of the unknown and unknowable. The unknown is represented by uncertainties over the future, given the
current rate of technological change, and conflicting messages received from the scientists, government and the
media about a wide range of risk issues. The unknowable is represented by fear of the complexity of scientific
knowledge, and its inaccessibility to lay people, as well as the complex and interwoven nature of many
environmental and health risks. With many 20th century diseases, such as allergic and immunocompetence
conditions, traditional epidemiological methods of finding a single cause for a single disease fail because the 26
causes are multiple and synergistic, and the conditions ill-defined and variable between individuals. Existential
isolation anxiety is characterized by feelings of hopelessness and helplessness in the face of the global political
economy, and the striving for community or togetherness is often founded on making joint protests or opting out
of conventional lifestyles and discourses. This can sometimes lead to idealistic tribalism, which replaces
geographical tribalism via the sharing and reinforcement of common ideas amongst similar thinking people via the
ease of modern day travel and information/communication technologies such as email and the internet. Alienation
is often a matter of scale, with individuals feeling powerless in the face of world markets and international
agreements. However, modern forms of communication and lifestyles and the social structures they support may
themselves be alienating in containing little face-to-face human contact or quality time. Freedom and
responsibility are again often framed in terms of not being subjugated by the global political economy or the
discourses it promotes the modern equivalent of Hiedeggers impersonal They-Self. Individuals and groups can
choose to opt out, give up, try their best, or carry on regardless but it is always in opposition to or in collusion with
political and economic forces seen as being at a scale beyond the individuals power to change, and individual
action is hence usually framed in terms of personal lifestyle choice to reduce risks, protect the environment or
promote social equity. Meaninglessness anxiety seems to be a common response in the World Risk Society. Identity
and self-esteem are either maintained by small-scale successes, or reliance on being informed and using common
sense, but pessimism, crusad-ism, nihilism and vegetativeness are all common responses to technological and
environmental risks. Unfortunately, the great increase in information in techno-logical societies has created more
confusion and, in the opinion of many people, devalued all information leading to more reliance on folklore, lay
epidemiology and common sense to evaluate uncertain and ill-defined risks. Rebellion against political and
institutional structures has often been reduced to stigmatization of particular organizations (such as the privatized
water companies, see Langford et al., 1999a; Georgiou et al., 1998) or products (such as GM foods). This
atomization of protest increases the sense of meaningless-ness, where one can only hope to achieve something
small and hence potentially meaningless or else give up hope of things ever being different and merely find a
comfortable way to survive the inevitable. In conclusion, this paper has attempted, via theoretical argument, case

present a different analysis of risk perception by

individuals within social and political systems. Existential issues
studies and discussion, to

and anxieties, that are common to being human across space and
time , have been explored whilst at the same time examining the relationship between humans and risk in
contemporary post-industrial society. One conclusion that can be drawn from this analysis is that the range of
individual and social responses to risk are symptomatic of far more global anxieties about the functioning and
future of the world in general. Risk issues and conflicts are therefore not merely a product of a risk society, but an
integral part of its operation.

Only by providing people with a genuine chance

to understand, have hope and believe in the possibility of instigating

change , can

risk managers provide risk communication

strategies

that

actually

communicate about risk . This is because of the complex and profound

role that risk perception plays in structuring identities, defining
discourses and bringing order and sense to the world. Otherwise,
fear of the unknown, alienation, helplessness and reactions to these
states of mind will always win the day .

Ignoring the threat causes panic worse than fear, stops

solvency, turns their state power arguments
Sandman 03
Peter M. PhD in Communications and Professor at Rutgers specializing in crisis communication; Jody, Psychiatrist, 28 April, Fear Is
Spreading Faster than SARS And So It Should!

Covering up an
epidemic is about as bad a communication strategy as we can
imagine. Among its outcomes: China actually does face a panic problem, as
its people confront not just a raging epidemic but a government
that lies to them about it. The Wests soft cover-up is much
gentler and less dishonest a cover-up of over-reassurance and minimization rather than of lies.
But if SARS does keep getting worse in the West, as it has in China, the soft
cover-up will also fail ... and may also provoke panic. Public anxiety
can lead to genuine panic or to astonishing resilience. The paradox is that
efforts to squelch the anxiety (allay the publics fear is the usual phrase) can actually
induce the panic it aims to prevent. Resilience is likelier when
authorities ally with the anxiety, harness it, and steer it instead of trying to prevent
China is universally condemned for covering up SARS and putting the world at risk.

it. Of course even superb handling of the publics fears may not prevent panic if the epidemic gets bad enough.

panic will be likelier

and more widespread if the authorities have been minimizing the
risk than if they have been acknowledging it candidly and compassionately.
There has often been some panic during the great epidemics of the past. But

Takes out alt solvency and turns their impacts

Sandman 03
Peter M. PhD in Communications and Professor at Rutgers specializing in crisis communication; Jody, Psychiatrist, 28 April, Fear Is
Spreading Faster than SARS And So It Should!

Any normal person is going to be more anxious

than usual while awaiting a biopsy result, a turbulent airplane landing, or a l8ayoff
notice. Human emotions tend to match the situation. The same is true
of a more widespread threat. Of course the public at large will be commensurately alarmed
when told that a terrorism attack, an epidemic, or a hurricane may be approaching. Moreover, fear isnt
just normal in frightening situations; it is functional. Both the human body and
Lets start with the obvious.

the body politic ultimately benefit from the changes (physiological and sociological ... and inevitably emotional) that
accompany preparedness for crisis. Take terrorism as a case in point. Nearly everyone agrees that we need people
to be vigilant for indications of terrorist attacks; to prepare themselves and their families to cope with possible
attacks; to be supportive of preparedness expenses and tolerant of preparedness inconveniences. And nearly
everyone agrees that we need all this to ramp up in an actual attack, so that people put other agendas on hold,
follow instructions willingly, and help care for their neighbors. The question is what emotional state, what state of

We wont get
there if terrorism is merely one of many issues people are
concerned about, along with West Nile Virus and inflation and rap
lyrics. Either terrorism is different from most other concerns, or it
mind, is conducive to this sort of public readiness. We believe the right answer is fear.

isnt. If it is, we need to get used to the idea that people are going
to be appropriately frightened , and we need to help them get used to it too.
functional.

Not all fear is

Fear that is paralyzing, fear that verges on panic, is obviously not

functional . Terror is the goal of terrorism, not the goal of

preparedness. But fear is not necessarily terror. This is a conceptual
mistake officials routinely make, a mistake they seem terribly attracted to the
embedded, preconscious, erroneous assumption that all fear is one
short step removed from panic. Some fear is. Most fear is not. When officials express their
reluctance about unduly frightening people, they are literally right. The key word here is unduly. Unduly
frightening people is wrong. Duly frightening people is right , and
important. The problem is telling the two apart. The distinction is partly a matter of degree enough fear versus
excessive fear. Perhaps in addition there are kinds of fear like the kinds of cholesterol good fear versus bad

the key difference is neither the amount of fear nor the

kind of fear, but rather peoples ability to bear the fear. Much is
known about how to enhance that ability. Among the things that help: Give
people things to do action binds anxiety. Give people things to
decide decision-making provides more individual control, which makes
fear more tolerable. Encourage appropriate anger the desire to get even often trumps the
desire to cower. Encourage love (and camaraderie) soldiers, for example, fight for their
friends and for their country. Provide candid leadership we get more
frightened when our leaders seem to be misleading us. Show your
own fear and show you can bear it apparently fearless leaders are little help to a fearful
public. Most importantly, treat other peoples fear as legitimate. Fear is
likeliest to escalate into terror or panic (or to flip into denial) when
it is treated as shameful and wrong. Its natural to be afraid, Im afraid too is a much
fear. But we suspect

more empathic response to public fear than theres nothing to be afraid of. If we want people to bear their fear,
we must assure them that their fear is appropriate. Even fear that is statistically inappropriate can and should be

Leaders who are contemptuous of

peoples fear have a much tougher time explaining the reasons why
they neednt be afraid.
legitimized as normal, understandable, and widespread.

Fear of extinction is a legitimate and productive response to

the modern condition---working through it by validating our
representations is the only way to create an authentic
relationship to the world and death
Macy 2K
Joanna Macy, adjunct professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, 2000, Environmental Discourse and
Practice: A Reader, p. 243

We are confronted by
social breakdown, wars, nuclear proliferation , and the progressive
The move to a wider ecological sense of self is in large part a function of the dangers that are threatening to overwhelm us.

destruction of our biosphere . Polls show that people today are aware that the world, as they know it, may come to an end. This loss of
certainty that there will be a future is the pivotal psychological reality of our time. Over the past twelve years my colleagues and I have
worked with tens of thousands of people in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, helping them
confront and explore what they know and feel about what is happening to
their world. The purpose of this work, which was first known as Despair and Empowerment Work, is to
overcome the numbing and powerlessness that result from suppression of
painful responses to massively painful realities. As their grief and fear for the world
is allowed to be expressed without apology or argument and validated as a wholesome, lifepreserving response , people break through their avoidance mechanisms,
break through their sense of futility and isolation . Generally what they break
through into is a larger sense of identity. It is as if the pressure of their
acknowledged awareness of the suffering of our world stretches or
collapses the culturally defined boundaries of the self . It becomes clear, for example, that the
grief and fear experienced for our world and our common future are
categorically different from similar sentiments relating to ones personal
welfare. This pain cannot be equated with dread of ones own individual demise. Its source lies less in concerns for personal survival than in apprehensions of collective
suffering of what looms for human life and other species and unborn generations to come. Its nature is akin to the original meaning of compassion suffering with. It is
the distress we feel on behalf of the larger whole of which we are a part.
And, when it is so defined, it serves as a trigger or getaway to a more
encompassing sense of identity, inseparable from the web of life in which
we are as intricately connected as cells in a larger body. This shift in consciousness is an appropriate, adaptive response. For the
crisis that threatens our planet , be it seen in its military, ecological, or
social aspects, derives from a dysfunctional and pathogenic notion of the
self . It is a mistake about our place in the order of things. It is the delusion that the self is so separate and fragile that we must delineate and defend its boundaries, that it is so
small and needy that we must endlessly acquire and endlessly consume, that it is so aloof that we can as individuals, corporations, nation-states, or as a species be immune to what
we do to other beings.

2NC Ext #1 -- Suicide =/= Solve

If the sovereign cant control the dying, it MUST control the
living
PAS is practiced around fear of a bad death, not an end to
survivalism. Addressing the causes of these fears if a
necessary prereq to legalizing PAS or inequality and abuse is
inevitable
Emanuel (M.D., Ph.D. Vice President for Ethics Standards, American Medical
Association) 98
(Linda L., A Question of Balance in Regulating how we die: the ethical, medical, and
legal issues surrounding physician-assisted suicide, Pg. 258-60)
Sixth, and perhaps most important of all, physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia are apparently not the real issues being raised

It is essential to have a
solid grip on the root motivations for calls for assisted death , whether
made by individu- als or the larger society, and to respond to the root cause before the
overt call is evaluated on face value. Treatment of the root cause is far more reliable, safe, and effective than
treatment of the presenting complaint alone. This is a matter of sound clinical and social policy practice . Strong data
all point to the predominance of psychosocial, contextual suffering
or fear of suffering as moti- vators, rather than current, unbearable,
unrelievable, pathophysi- ological suffering. Most requesters are motivated not by
pain but by fear: fear of future suffering, fear of indignity, fear of
burden- someness, fear of abandonment, and fear of lost control. The
severity of psychOsocial suffering need not be understated to stand by this argument. Rather, the point is that
psychosocial suffering should be treated by ameliorating its
sources, not by eliminating the victim. Unfortunately, the widely acknowledged difficultyof
by suffering patients and policymakers, nor the best answer to their concerns.

assessing and lessening psychosocial suffering is a factorthat could ~ake physicians more prone to misuse of physi- cianassistedsuicide and euthanasia if it were legalized. Sothis is the position to which the reflective process of editing thisvolumehas led

the current physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia debate in

the United States is a false debate. If society takes the call for legally endorsed physi- cian-assistedsuicide and
me: In a very real sense,

euthanasia on face value alone, and if themedicalprofession as a whole or physicians in particular take patients' calls for physicianassisted suicide and euthanasia on facevalue alone, society, the profession, and physicians will have madea graveerror,

Without better understanding of the fears that drive these requests,

policies will be enacted and acts taken that not only miss the point
but risk abuse. Some of history's great mistakes have been founded on
misconceptions no greater than this failure to examine root causes.
Positions on whether or not physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia are ever justifiable neednot hinder us from reaching a
consensus on the need to pursuethis investigation. A responsible society and a responsible professionwould not wish to pursue
contentious policy, and a professionalwould not wish to act for reasons that turn out to havebeen beside the point and risky. This is
not the place to examine in depth the root causes of requestsfor assisted suicide; I am neither a psychologist nor a sociologist,and
no spiritual authority either. Nonetheless, it is relevantto note that society in general, and medical culture too, havebeen in a deathdenying era, perhaps since the sClentlfic revolution or at least since biomedical technology became so powerfulin this century.
Society sequesters and sanitizes our dyingin hospitals, it pursues youth, control, and potency, and It avoidstalk of normal dying. We
do not have a healthy place in societyfor the dying and for rituals surrounding death. Cultural health and personal maturity require a
balanced place for the realities of normal dying. Perhaps the physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia debate is evidence that
society is beginning to climb out of its death-denying phase. Or perhaps its is evidence of imbalance and irrational denial; the call for
physician-assited suicide and euthanasia could be an attempt to be rid of normal dying. Or perhaps

death denial is

only part of the problem. Per- haps societal selfishness and pride of
potency have caused failing members of society to be and feel
unwelcome, burdensome, abandoned, undignified, and ashamed to
be the frail humans that we all are.

1NR

1NR Uniqueness Wall

Extend the Blake 10/17 card, democrats have made smarter
investments and have been playing the long game which will
pay off on November 4th ignore snapshots, our evidence is
predictive
High amounts of uncertainty and your methods of calculating
winners is wrong
Wang 10/15 <Sam, PEC, No, Republicans Aren't Guaranteed to Win the Senate.
Here's Why., http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119844/2014-midterm-predictionsrepublicans-not-guaranteed-win-senate>#SPS
On Monday, the Libertarian candidate for Senate in Iowa, Doug Butzier, died in a plane crash. Butzier, an emergency room
physician, was polling at only 2 percent. But Republican candidate Joni

Ernst leads the Democratic candidate, Bruce

Braley, by an even narrower margin. How Butzier's supporters eventually vote is a question of national
significance. Half a dozen other Senate races are equally likely to come
down to the wire. That's why control of the chamber is still uncertain, even
though the election is less than three weeks away. Such uncertainty is apparently belied by the fact that the major aggregators of
Senate polls are pointing in the same direction, with probabilities ranging from 60 percent and up for Republican control. This
includes my own site, the Princeton Election Consortium, which recently switched away from a Democratic advantage in early

this unanimous agreement among

election forecasters conceals an Achilles heel: We all rely on the
same poll data. What if that data is off? A Few Front-Runners in Close Elections
Will Lose on Election Day Josh Katz at The New York Times' The Upshot has analyzed the performance of
October. Indeed, Republicans hold the lead in key states, but

Senate polls since 2004. He found that the predictive accuracy of polls depends on how soon the election is and the size of the front-

if the election is three weeks away and the frontrunner leads by 3 percent or less, that candidate will still lose 38
percent of the timenearly two times out of five. In the period Katz analyzed, only three or four Senate races in
each election were decided by 3 percentage points or less. But as of Tuesday, such narrow margins
existed in six races: Data as of Tuesday, October 14, via the Princeton Election Consortium. Four more
racesAlaska, Arkansas, Kentucky, and New Hampshireare within
4 or 5 percentage points. So the potential exists for many close
outcomes. For election nerds like me, this is Christmas. If every front-runner today were to win, the Senate outcome would
be 52 Republicans and 48 Democrats and independents. But history tells us to expect two or
three of the current leaders to lose. Democratic wins in the key states of Iowa and Colorado would
runner's lead. For instance,

give a 50-50 split, with Vice President Joe Biden breaking Senate ties in his party's favor. (This assumes that Kansas independent
Greg Orman would caucus with Democrats and the other independents, which is not a sure bet.) Of course, if the opposite were to
happen North Carolinawith Republican Thom Tillis defeating Democratic Senator Kay Hagan, who leads narrowlythe GOP would

Some races are less likely to reverse than polls

would indicate. In polls spanning the last two weeks, Georgia Republican David Perdue's median lead over Democrat
end up with a convincing 53-47 majority.

Michelle Nunn dropped to 1 percent after he proclaimed last week to be "proud" about outsourcing jobs as an executive at nowdefunct Pillowtex Corp. To avoid a runoff, Nunn must exceed 50 percent of the vote. Turnout tends to decrease in Georgia runoff

Voters in these six closelyfought states are disproportionately powerful, which accounts for the concentration of
elections, so current polls are of little help in predicting the outcome of a runoff.

advertising and get-out-the-vote activity in the battleground states. Measured in terms of their ability to influence Senate control, a
vote cast in Iowa is about 110 times as powerful as that of a vote cast in Minnesota. Similarly, a Colorado voter is over 30 times as
powerful as that of an Oregon voter. And my vote in New Jersey, a populous state where Senator Cory Booker has a 12-percentagepoint lead, is worth less than even an Oregon or Minnesota vote. Democrats Tend To Perform Better Than Polls Predict Even in the
week before the election, polls are not perfect. For example, in two out of ten close Senate races in 2010 and 2012. In those two
cases, both in 2010, the eventual winner was the Democrat (Harry Reid in Nevada and Michael Bennet in Colorado). This reflects a

When errors occur, the outcome tends to be more favorable

to the Democrat. Let's examine the percentage difference between polls and election results: The presidential
broader pattern:

findings come from comparing the final Meta-Margin with the eventual margin of victory in the tipping-point state, i.e. the state that
pushed the winner just over the electoral-vote threshold for victory. The above table, calculated for state-level presidential and
Senate contests, shows the difference between Election Eve polls with actual election results, using the median across all races
decided by less than a 10-percent margin. Overall, these numbers set a range for how wrong we would expect a poll-based view to

Pollsters as a group underestimate Democratic performance by an

average of 1.2 percent. This bias is asymmetric: When Republicans outperformed, they did so by 1.2
percentage points or less. But in four out of eight cases, Democrats surpassed
polls by 2.4 to 3.7 percentage points. This bias was even larger in
Colorado, where Democrats outperformed polls by at least 4 percentage points in the 2010 and 2012 elections.
Instead of Probability, Estimate How Much Swing Is Needed What if this
be.

year's polls are off by 2 percentage points in one direction or the other? A 2-point advantage for Democrats would make the most
likely outcome a split of 50 Democrats/independents to 50 Republicans. And a 2-point advantage for Republicans would propel them
to a 53-47 majority. These outcomes match the "what if two races flip" scenarios I outlined above. Neither extreme is guaranteed.

The introduction of new survey methods may have changed the

accuracy of pollsfor better or for worseand partisan polls are more frequent
this year, creating another source of uncertainty. In fact, the probabilities offered by poll
aggregators might not even be the best way to think about this
year's Senate forecasts, in part because we tend to mentally round
probabilities up to 100 percent. The Princeton Election Consortium, for instance, gives Republicans a
69 percent chance of taking the Senate; if that fails to happen, many will claim that PEC was wrong. But a loaded coin that's biased
to come up heads 69 percent of the time would still come up tails three times out of ten. Or think of it like a weather forecast: If
there's a 69 percent chance of rain, you'd be well-advised to bring an umbrella, but you might end up not using it. Instead of

The Senate Meta-Margin is

defined as how much the final vote would have to differ from polls in
key states to create an exact toss-up for control of the chamber. Given
the polling errors I have analyzed in this article, neither side can breathe easier until the
Meta-Margin gets to at least 3 percent in their direction. Only at that point can
probability, I prefer a statistic I developed in 2004, the Meta-Margin.

we predict a winner with high confidence. As of Wednesday, the Senate Meta-Margin shows a Republican lead of 1.3 percenttoo
close to call. So although Republicans have the advantage in polls,

outperforming polls works

Democrats' track record of

in the other direction. For the moment, there's a decent probability that polling

nerds will be surprised on November 4.

Heres some of those states

Plotkin, 10.16.14 political analyst and contributor to the BBC on American
politics (Mark, The Hill, Some possible midterm suprises
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/campaign/220883-some-possible-midtermsurprises) jb

Some very
unlikely scenarios might just take place that could save the day for the
Democrats. No. 1 is Kansas, which I wrote about last week (Independent Greg
Ormond beating Republican Sen. Pat Roberts.) No. 2, of all places, is South
Dakota. There is a former three-term Republican senator , the
irrepressible Larry Pressler, who very well may be a godsend for the
Democrats. He is pulling votes away from the Republican candidate,
former Gov. Mike Rounds. Now-Independent Pressler is definitely aiding Democrat Rick Weiland.
Remember, South Dakota has sent Democrats to the U.S. Senate James
If either Udall or Braley loses, the game is then over. Republicans are in charge. But wait a minute:

A candidate can
win this race with as little as 33 percent. There is no runoff it's
just a simple plurality. And there is even a fourth candidate, Gordon
Howie. He's a conservative and probably is pulling votes away from Republican Rounds. Another
nontraditional candidate is helping Democratic candidate Michelle
Nunn in Georgia. Libertarian Party nominee Amanda Swafford is
viewed as taking votes away from Republican David Perdue. We haven't
talked about North Carolina. This is the only state where an endangered
Democrat (Kay Hagan) seems to be leading in the polls. There, the savior for
the Democrats is again a libertarian. He is a pizza delivery man. His
name is Sean Haugh. Republican candidate Thom Tillis wishes his
name was not on the ballot. If third party libertarians continue to get their names on the ballot,
this is an ominous development for the Republican Party in the future. I
firmly believe that they deliver close races to the Democrats. Their 5
percent to 10 percent is taking votes from the GOP. So on Tuesday, Nov. 4, you
Abourezk, Tom Daschle and the retiring Tim Johnson. And, of course, George McGovern.

very well might pay attention to former no-names Larry Pressler, Gordon Howie, Amanda Swafford and Sean

These so-called fringe players might be soon getting thank-you

notes from Senater Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
Haugh.

Money goes Dem

Angle 10/16 <Jim, Fox, Democrats outraising Republicans as election nears,
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/10/16/democrats-outraising-republicans-aselection-nears/>#SPS
Despite outrage from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Democrats about billionaires like the Koch

Democrats are outraising Republicans

this election season. Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive Politics estimated, "the
Democratic senatorial campaign committee has raised $111 million
compared to $82 million for their Republican counterpart." Even
when you take all sources of money, from all donors for all races,
the Democrats still lead. "It's about $595 million for the Democrats,
and about $450 million for the Republicans," Krumholz said. In the run-up to the Nov.
brothers donating to the GOP, statistics show

4 election, the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee made a last minute push and just announced it raised
$15.5 million in September, its best month ever. Political analyst Michael Barone of the American Enterprise
Institute said, "that's a change and it says that Republican contributors big and small are martialing to the cause."

Although the Democrats have enjoyed a money lead for some time,
they still are asking for more cash. A Democratic campaign group on October 7 urged, "Today's ad buy deadline is
the most critical of the election. This is our last chance to rescue Democrats drowning in Koch-funded attacks. Can
you chip in $5 or more?" Ben Wieder of the Center for Public Integrity, another watchdog group, noted,
"everyone

kind of likes to play the underdog role. And so it's been

very interesting to see fundraising ads, particularly related to
Senate races where Democrats are claiming that, you know, they're
losing the race." Much of the Democratic party's money comes from the president's non-stop efforts to
raise cash, having done more than 50 fundraisers, seven just last week, all closed to the media, including one at the
home of real estate baron Rich Richman -- a name Democrats would likely ridicule if he were giving to Republicans.

Democratic Senate candidates, while happy to get the money,

sometimes try to avoid being seen with an unpopular president.

According to Barone, that's "because these candidates are running in states where President Obama's job
performance rating is negative, in many cases highly negative." In some recent polls, his personal approval rating
stands at only 40 percent. Democrats recently pulled money from 11 marginal races, and the Republicans just
poured another $6.5 million into the Senate race in North Carolina after internal polls showed Republican Thom Tillis
in a position to win. Wieder explained,"as

you're getting three weeks out, you've got

to spend your money in the places where it will do the most good."
But not all money goes into ads. Some is reserved for voter turnout
efforts, because fewer people vote in mid-term elections. Wieder noted that "TV ads accounted
for about 50 percent and then that pool of the remaining 50
percent, you can kind of split between get out the vote, mailers,
phone calls." Low turnout elections tend to favor the angriest and most energized voters, and these days,
that tends to be Republicans. There's a close correlation between how voters approve of the president, whether it's
this president or the previous one, and how they vote in Senate elections," Barone explained.

Money influences key senate races history proves.

Edgar, 10 [Bob, President of Common Cause, How Money Influences Elections,
The New York Times, 10-20-10,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/opinion/l21brooks.html, RSR]

Brooks argues that because bigspending candidates often lose to lesser-funded challengers, theres no
In Dont Follow the Money (column, Oct. 19), David

reason to be concerned about the flood of large donations, many of them secret, flowing into Congressional
contests this fall.

His analysis fails on two levels . First, its clear that money

counts in our elections . Since 2000, the average winner in contests

for open House seats has outspent the average loser by at least
$310,000, according to figures compiled by the nonpartisan
Campaign Finance Institute. In races for open Senate seats, winners
outspent losers , on average, in every year except 2002. Far more
important than who wins and not mentioned by Mr. Brooks is the difference
that big contributions make after the election. The individuals, corporations, trade
groups and unions writing record-sized checks this fall will want a return on their investments; winning candidates,
outspent or not, will have a powerful incentive to provide it. These are building blocks for scandal.

Grimes is awesome at fundraising

Sullivan 10/17 <Sean, WP, The winners and losers of the third quarter
fundraising period, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/postpolitics/wp/2014/10/17/the-winners-and-losers-of-the-third-quarter-fundraisingperiod/>#SPS
Alison Lundergan Grimes: This has been the roughest week of the Kentucky Democratic Senate nominee's

Grimes raised a whopping $4.9 million

during the third quarter, outpacing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R)
and reminding the political world once again that she is among the
2014 cycle's most talented fundraisers. Fundraising isn't everything, since national
campaign. But not because of fundraising.

Democrats have gone dark in this race -- a sign that Grimes's chances of winning have dimmed. But even if she
loses, there will be plenty of Democrats who will want Grimes to run for higher office again in the future because of
her fundraising abilities.

Hagan winning dolla dolla bills

Taylor 10/17 <Jessica, The Hill, Campaign cash winners, losers,
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/221046-top-10-fundraising-winners-andlosers>#SPS

Money is one of the chief reasons this Tar

Heel incumbent [Hagan] may be the only red state Democrat to survive in
November. She again topped the charts with $4.9 million fundraising to Tilliss $3.4 million. The GOP state
Democrat Kay Hagan, North Carolina Senate

House Speaker has picked up the pace from his initial paltry hauls, and has slightly more in the bank, but

Hagans early spending pace is whats kept her above water.

Same old story in CO means Udall wins

Scott 10/15 <Dylan, TPM, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/mark-udall-2014-islike-michael-bennet-2010>#SPS
By all the public polling, Democrats should really be sweating the Colorado Senate race at this point. Democratic
Sen. Mark Udall trails his Republican challenger, Rep. Cory Gardner, by more than 5 points on average. Election
forecasters have pegged Colorado (along with Iowa) as the most likely election to swing control of the Senate. But
Democrats believe they've seen this movie before. In the 2010 Colorado Senate campaign, Democratic nominee
Michael Bennet trailed (or was at best tied) in the last 11 polls of his race against Republican Ken Buck. But then on
Election Day, Bennet eked out a less-than-1 point win, a rare bright spot in an otherwise tough cycle for Democrats.
The win was attributed by the press to his campaign's singular focus on two core Democratic constituencies -women and Hispanics -- and an unprecedented, data-driven get-out-the-vote effort. Now Bennet is the chairman of

the DSCC has attracted headlines

for exporting the Bennet model in 2014 to other tough races like Arkansas and Louisiana
in a $60 million effort named for Bannock Street, where Bennet's campaign offices were located in Denver. But
in an ironic twist, the model may be put to its severest test right
back where it began, in Colorado, where Democrats are hoping to
recreate the Bennet 2010 magic to pull out a win for Udall . The methods
the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and

have evolved -- better software this time, an all mail-in ballot election -- but the foundation remains the same, Paul
Dunn, DSCC's national field director, told TPM in a phone interview. "I think the core principle was that was
established with Bennet was: This matters," Dunn, who worked on Bennet's 2010 campaign, said. "If you are in the

"What we saw there in 2010, the

question was, how are you going to overcome this Republican wave
in Colorado?" he said. "We found that what works is we have ways to
mechanically turn the electorate, that the way which we can do it is
with targeting and prioritization." The Bennet influences on Udall's campaign (and 2014
red zone, this becomes extremely important."

Democratic Senate campaigns in general) are everywhere. It starts with the national committee and works down to
the campaign staff. Dunn and DSCC executive director Guy Cecil were top operatives for Bennet 2010. Udall
campaign manager Adam Dunstone was a deputy for Bennet's team. The messaging in Colorado has been
relentless.

About half of Udall's TV ads have been focused on women's

issues, according to the Washington Post. Back in 2010, Bennet ran an ad with a local OB/GYN warning about
Buck's extremism on women's health, and now Udall's campaign is going up with an ad this week featuring a local
OB/GYN warning about Gardner's opposition to abortion, part of its final push to flood the Colorado airwaves before

The Udall campaign and the outside groups supporting him

have released numerous Spanish-language ads, too. "That strategy worked pretty
Election Day.

well and it's really the same one that Democrats are now hoping to use against Cory Gardner," Peter Hanson, who

"If Udall can get liberal-leaning

women to turn out in larger numbers by raising fears that Cory
studies Colorado politics at the University of Denver, told TPM.

Gardner just doesn't get it, he's much more likely to win the race ...
It's a lesson that the Democrats learned four years ago." The big test for
Udall's team is whether they can successfully execute this strategy when the Republican campaign has seemed
explicitly engineered to avoid a repeat of 2010. Buck was a notoriously blunt candidate that year, with cringeworthy lines like "I do not wear high heels." But since he announced his candidacy in early 2014, Gardner has been
straining to moderate himself. His campaign began with a renunciation of his support for a state "personhood"
amendment, which would outlaw abortion and many kinds of birth control. Gardner has still had some rocky
moments, particularly because he still co-sponsors a federal personhood bill. "It's more convenient for you to say
it's not a personhood bill," a local TV journalists snapped last month as Gardner insisted that there was no federal
personhood bill. "But does saying that make it true?" But between his personhood reversal and embrace of overthe-counter birth control, Gardner clearly came into the campaign ready to fight the Bennet 2010 playbook. This is
the playbook that they ran in 2010, and it worked. They did it again in 2012, he told the Washington Post earlier
this week. Its a tired, old playbook. And as a result of the failures of the policies of this administration, its not
going to work again, because people can see right through it. "It is a heavier lift in 2014 than in 2010. Republicans
have seen this strategy before," Hanson told TPM. "They were ready for it. They are running a candidate in Cory
Gardner who comes across as much more moderate." "The Republican strategy from day one has been to seek to
portray him in a much more progressive light and to try to head off these attacks," he continued. "I don't think it's a
strategy that's going to change minds about the Republican Party, but it might make it harder for Democrats to turn
out their constituencies." Udall's campaign, meanwhile, has led to an unfortunate nickname -- "Mark Uterus" and
rebukes from the Denver Post's editorial board and others. But that isn't stopping his campaign from pressing
forward with the message. They also note that Gardner has continued to run ads rebuffing the attacks -- which
suggests to Udall supporters that they're working. "The fact that he has to run his ads in the first place -- I think

A robust ground
operation -- that other key piece of the Bennet model -- was also a
big reason why he outperformed the polls on Election Day, as Udall
must now aim to do. Udall's campaign sent out a memo last week
boasting about how they had topped Bennet's operation in key
categories: 25 field offices in 2014, versus 15 in 2010; 100 field
organizers versus 40; and 3,200 volunteers in the last month versus
less than 1,000. Bennet beat the margin polling margin by nearly 4
points, according to Real Clear Politics. President Barack Obama did the same in 2012.
people misunderstand what's happening here," a Colorado Democrat told TPM.

Based on the polling now, that is the same sort of performance that Udall is going to need. So while critics might be
mocking his strategy, if Udall can repeat the 17-point edge that Bennet had with women and his 2-1 margin with

"Bennet and Udall's campaigns are doing the same

thing because they believe in science and polls," the Colorado Democrat said.
Hispanics, it won't matter.

"They're not doing this on a whim."

1NR Link Wall

The plan alienates religious groups, African Americans, the
elderly, and women
Emanuel 02

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD From the Department of Clinical Bioethics, Warren G. Magnuson
Clinical Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md. Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide A Review of
the Empirical Data From the United States http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=214736

certain sociodemographic characteristics consistently predict support and

opposition to euthanasia or PAS.13- 15 Catholics and people who report themselves to be
more religious are significantly more opposed to euthanasia or PAS. Similarly, African
Americans and older individuals are significantly more opposed to euthanasia or
PAS. Finally, some, but not all, surveys suggest that women are significantly more
Finally,

opposed to euthanasia or PAS. Interestingly, patients with terminal illnesses, such as cancer and chronic obstructive

pulmonary disease, have attitudes that are almost identical to the public's.16 In other words, having a serious, life-threatening
illness itself does not seem to alter attitudes toward the permissibility or opposition to euthanasia or PAS. Similarly, being a
caregiver for a terminally ill patient or a recently bereaved caregiver does not seem to affect attitudes toward euthanasia or PAS.16

Evangelical turnout causes a GOP victory especially in the

South
Gibson 14 <David, award-winning journalist, author and filmmaker, Republicans woo evangelical base in
bid to recapture the Senate, June 27th, http://www.religionnews.com/2014/06/27/republicans-launch-digital-effortrally-evangelicals-polls/>#SPS

The Republican National Committee [RNC] on Friday (June 27) launched its first web-based
effort to rally conservative believers behind the party, a sign of how
crucial voter turnout will be in this falls close-fought midterm
(RNS)

elections and an indication that the GOP cannot take its evangelical
Christian base for granted.

This shouldnt be outreach, this should be who we are it is who

we are, said Chad Connelly, director of faith engagement for the Republican National Committee and the force
behind this new initiative, GOPfaith.com. Evangelicals, Connelly said, are our biggest, most reliable voting bloc.

even though evangelicals identify more closely

than ever with the GOP, they have not been turning out at the polls
in sufficient numbers to carry Republican candidates to victory .
The problem, however, is that

Connelly, a conservative Christian and former chairman of the Republican Party in South Carolina, said that as he

for the election of Mitt Romney, he found that the

faith vote was an afterthought in a lot of places. That came back to
haunt the party, he said. He cited surveys showing that while 89 million Americans
identify as evangelical Christians, just a third of them voted in the
2012 election and more than a fifth of those voters pulled the
lever for President Obama. RNC chair Reince Priebus set up the RNCs Faith Engagement group last year, its
traveled the country in 2012 working

first-ever strategic initiative aimed exclusively at conservative faith-based voters. Priebus tapped Connelly to head
it, and this new get-out-the-vote campaign an online home for all of our efforts, all around the country, as he

In past years, the party didnt need to make such efforts. Conservative
believers reliably turned out for the GOP, often mobilized by adjunct organizations like
the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition. But those groups are gone or greatly
says in a video on the site.

diminished, and the GOP can now use digital tools much as Democrats have done to great effect to
directly reach constituents who may support their agenda but who are not
always showing up on Election Day. The aim of the website is, as it says, to build an army
of conservative pro-faith activists sympathetic believers of all faiths, but in particular conservative Christians.
The plan is to identify 100,000 believers who will spread the word at the grass roots, especially in churches. Central
to the effort are pastors, who Connelly said have been too reticent to preach about political issues. Under federal
law, houses of worship could jeopardize their tax-exempt status if they endorse individual candidates. Lets
overcome that myth of the IRS saying you cant talk about this from the pulpit, he said. Look, if theres no
freedom of speech in the pulpit, theres no freedom of speech. Now is the time of righteous indignation, he said,

The
immediate goal of this initiative is to maximize the faith vote in key
Senate races, especially in red or purple states like Kentucky,
Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana and North Carolina. Winning those
a time to be the turn-the-tables-over Jesus and not the meek, turn-the-other-cheek Jesus.

seats is essential to the GOP dreams of retaking the majority in the

Senate this year.

Women are key

Liasson 14 <Mara, national political correspondent for NPR, Women Voters To
Play Critical Role In The 2014 Elections, May 05,
http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2014/05/05/unmarried-women-voters>#SPS

Republicans and Democrats are paying particular attention

to women voters. At 53 percent, female voters make up more than
half of the electorate, and could be a significant key to determining
who holds the Senate in November. Republicans have had a longterm problem attracting women voters in general, but this year it
might be Democrats who face that problem. NPR National Politics Correspondent
This year, both

Mara Liasson joins Here & Nows Meghna Chakrabarti to discuss the critical role women could play in the 2014
midterm elections, as part of NPRs series She Votes. MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI, HOST: This is HERE AND NOW.
There are many ways to measure the American electorate: where voters live, how often they cast a ballot, who they
tend to vote for, how old they are, how much money they make, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In our data-driven

this year, both Republicans and Democrats are

paying close attention to one of the simplest, but most important
aspects of the American voter: gender. Female voters make up more
than half of the electorate, 53 percent. And their vote could be
crucial to the balance of power in the Senate in November. NPR national
world, the list goes on. But

politics correspondent Mara Liasson joins us now to discuss the critical role women could play in the 2014 midterm
elections. It's part of NPR's series She Votes. Mara, hi there. MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, there. Happy to be here.
CHAKRABARTI: Great to have you. So, first of all, I mean, let's just check one of the typical presumptions in politics
these days, and that is that the Republican Party is seen as having had a problem attracting female voters. But
check that with us, as I say. What do the numbers say, and do women actually tend to vote more along Democratic

the gender gap favors Democrats. Barack

Obama, for instance, won the overall women's vote by close to 30 points
last time in 2012. He did it by winning what's called the marriage gap. Married women actually voted
lines? LIASSON: There's no doubt that

for Mitt Romney by seven points. He won them. But unmarried women voted for Barack Obama by 36 points - a

Democrats usually win the women's vote because

of the marriage gap. CHAKRABARTI: Well, and yet, for the 2014 midterms, we're beginning to hear
margin of 36 points. So, yes,

concern amongst members of the Democratic Party that they may have trouble attracting female voters. What's
different this time around? LIASSON: Well,

the peculiar particular problem the

Democrats have in the midterm election this year is that unmarried

women - even though they are among the Democrats' most reliable
supporters - tend to disappear in the midterm elections. They just
don't turn out to vote. This is not uncommon with the entire
Democratic coalition. You know, what Barack Obama did was expand the electorate, and he created
something that's sometimes referred to as the Rising American Electorate, RAE: young people, minorities and

it all but evaporates in

midterms. And the problem the Democrats have is they have a lot of
reliable supporters out there, very reliable supporters - unmarried
women - but they have to get them to turn out, because unmarried
women drop off. In other words, the difference between their participation in presidential years and
unmarried women. That is a mighty coalition in presidential years. But

midterm elections is huge. And that's the Democrats' problem this year. They've got to get those unmarried women
who voted for them in 2008 and '12, but didn't vote for them generally or didn't vote at all in 2010, to come out this
year. CHAKRABARTI: Well, and just to put a number on this, in your reporting this morning when you're talking about
just what fraction of the electorate these unmarried or single women represent, you were talking about a quarter of
the entire electorate overall. LIASSON: Well,

a quarter of the entire electorate overall

are single women. You know, as marriage rates decline, the numbers of single women are growing. So
this is a growing portion of the electorate, not unlike all the other portions of the Democratic coalition. That's why
it's called the Rising American Electorate, because these groups are growing. The whiter, older, more rural married
section of the electorate, where Republicans do very well, that pool is shrinking. CHAKRABARTI: So is the fact that
maybe amongst the certain percentage of female voters, their hearts may be in it, but their feet aren't taking them
to the polls this November. Is that going to aid Republican candidates? Or is the Republican Party's historical
problem with female voters just going to play out once again in November? LIASSON: No, it's going to aid

the Republican electorate turns out in midterm elections. It is

whiter, older, more married, but that actually is a good description
of the electorate in an off-year, in a midterm election. And so
Republicans are advantaged this year, for many, many reasons,
where the crucial Senate races are happen to be in red states, but
also because their electorate are more habitual voters. That's the problem
the Democrats have. They have to find these women. They have to engage them. As you
Republican voters, because

said, their hearts are with the Democrats, but their feet aren't taking them to the polls. They're not as hyped up.
They don't hear about the elections as much. So

it is not going to be a huge problem for

Republicans this year.

Republicans have a long-term, serious problem with women voters,

particularly in presidential years. But this year, I would say the female vote problem is the Democrats'.

Elderlty determine the outcome

Taegan Goddard, staff, Seniors May Be the New Swing Vote in 2014, THE WEEK,
103013, http://theweek.com/article/index/252028/seniors-may-be-the-newswing-vote-in-2014, accessed 9-14-14.
In previous cycles, we've had soccer moms and NASCAR dads as

elections

one way or another. Next year it

the voting demographic that tipped

may be seniors. Seniors

broke heavily for

are usually a disproportionate voice in midterm elections

because they're more likely to vote. A new Democracy Corps (D) surveysuggests they may play
an even bigger role in the 2014 midterm elections . And they're moving to vote Democratic.
Republicans in 2010 and they

African Americans are key to a democratic win

Martin 14 <Jonathan, national political correspondent for The New York Times, At Risk in Senate,
Democrats Seek to Rally Blacks Aug 30, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/us/politics/at-risk-in-senatedemocrats-seek-to-rally-blacks.html?ref=todayspaper>#SPS

With their Senate majority imperiled, Democrats are

trying to mobilize African-Americans outraged by the shooting in Ferguson, Mo., to
help them retain control of at least one chamber of Congress for
President Obamas final two years in office. In black churches and on black talk radio,
WASHINGTON

African-American civic leaders have begun invoking the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, along with
conservative calls to impeach Mr. Obama, as they urge black voters to channel their anger by voting Democratic in
the midterm elections, in which minority turnout is typically lower. Ferguson has made it crystal clear to the
African-American community and others that weve got to go to the polls, said Representative John Lewis,
Democrat of Georgia and a civil-rights leader. You participate and vote, and you can have some control over what

The push is an attempt to counter

Republicans many advantages in this years races, including polls
that show Republican voters are much more engaged in the
elections at this point an important predictor of turnout. Mr.
Lewis is headlining efforts to mobilize black voters in several states
with competitive Senate races, including Arkansas, Louisiana and
North Carolina. The drive is being organized by the Congressional Black Caucus, in coordination with the
happens to your child and your country.

Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Other steps, such as recruiting N.B.A. players to help register more

While Democrats always seek to increase

African-American turnout, that they are taking such aggressive
steps to rally their most loyal constituency reflects the increasingly
difficult landscape they face. In recent weeks, seats in Colorado, Iowa and
New Hampshire, once expected to tilt toward the Democrats, have
become more competitive. Mr. Obamas approval rating has tumbled
below 40 percent in states with some of the most competitive races,
African-Americans, are also underway.

and Republicans already seem assured to win at least three of the six seats they need to take back the Senate.

And the terrain is tricky: Many of the states where the black vote
could be most crucial are also those where Mr. Obama is deeply
unpopular among many white voters. So Democratic senators in places like Arkansas,
Louisiana and North Carolina must distance themselves from the nations first African-American president while
trying to motivate the black voters who are his most loyal constituents. Labor Day is the unofficial kickoff for the

the contest for control of the Senate

remains unsettled, though most give a slight edge to the Republicans.
general election campaign, and analysts say

After a turbulent summer dominated more by a succession of grim news events at home and abroad than by typical
election-year appeals, officials in both parties agree that the campaign is fluid and that a wave election, with one

The black vote could prove

particularly decisive in four Southern states: Georgia and Louisiana, where AfricanAmericans make up more than 30 percent of eligible voters; North Carolina, where they are 22 percent;
and Arkansas, 15 percent. While minority turnout traditionally declines in nonpresidential election years,
there have been midterm elections in which Southern blacks played a
pivotal role. An example occurred in 1998, when President Bill Clinton was, like Mr. Obama, under fire
party winning a large number of seats, is unlikely to happen.

from Republicans and nearing the end of his White House years.

1NC Complexity
Linearity might not be true but complexity isnt 100% true
either
Dr. Sebastian L. V. Gorka et al 12, Director of the Homeland Defense Fellows
Program at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University,
teaches Irregular Warfare and US National Security at NDU and Georgetown, et al.,
Spring 2012, The Complexity Trap, Parameters,
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/parameters/Articles/2012spring/Gallagher_Geltz
er_Gorka.pdf
These competing views of Americas national security concerns indicate an important and distinctive characteristic of todays global landscape:

prioritization is simultaneously very difficult and very important for the United States.
Each of these threats and potential threatsal Qaeda, China, nuclear
proliferation, climate change, global disease, and so oncan conjure up
a worstcase scenario that is immensely intimidating. Given the difficulty of combining
estimates of probabilities with the levels of risk associated with these threats, it is challenging to establish
priorities. Such choices and trade-offs are difficult, but not impossible . 30 In fact,
they are the stock-in-trade of the strategist and planner. If the United States is
going to respond proactively and effectively to todays international
environment, prioritization is the key first step and precisely the
opposite reaction to the complacency and undifferentiated fear that the
notion of unprecedented complexity encourages . Complexity suggests a
maximization of flexibility and minimization of commitment ; but
prioritization demands wise allotment of resources and attention in a
way that commits American power and effort most effectively and
efficiently. Phrased differently, complexity induces deciding not to decide;
prioritization encourages deciding which decisions matter most. Todays
world of diverse threats characterized by uncertain probabilities and unclear risks will overwhelm us if
the specter of complexity seduces us into either paralysis or paranoia. Some
priorities need to be set if the United States is to find the resources to confront what threatens it most. 31 As Michael
Doran recently argued in reference to the Arab Spring, the United States must train itself to see a large dune as something more formidable than just

This is not to deny the possibility of nonlinear phenomena,

butterfly effects, self-organizing systems that exhibit patterns in the absence of centralized authority,
or emergent properties. 33 If anything, these hallmarks of complexity theory
remind strategists of the importance of revisiting key assumptions in
light of new data and allowing for tactical flexibility in case of unintended consequences. Sound
strategy requires hard choices and commitments, but it need not be
inflexible. We can prioritize without being procrustean. But a model in
which everything is potentially relevant is a model in which nothing is.
endless grains of sand.32

Even if predictions in the abstract are wrong, policy

debates is productive, improves predictive accuracy, and
solves cession of the debate to cloistered experts
Tetlock 11 (Philip Tetlock is a professor of organizational behavior at the Haas
Business School at the University of California-Berkeley, AND Dan Gardner is a
columnist and senior writer for the Ottawa Citizen and the author of The Science of
Fear, received numerous awards for his writing, including the Michener Award, M.A.
History from York, "OVERCOMING OUR AVERSION TO ACKNOWLEDGING OUR
IGNORANCE" July 11 www.cato-unbound.org/2011/07/11/dan-gardner-and-philiptetlock/overcoming-our-aversion-to-acknowledging-our-ignorance/)

The optimists are right that there is much we can do at a cost that is quite modest
relative to what is often at stake. For example, why not build on the IARPA tournament? Imagine a system for
recording and judging forecasts. Imagine running tallies of forecasters accuracy rates.
Imagine advocates on either side of a policy debate specifying in advance
precisely what outcomes their desired approach is expected to produce, the
evidence that will settle whether it has done so, and the conditions
under which participants would agree to say I was wrong. Imagine pundits
being held to account. Of course arbitration only works if the arbiter is universally respected and it would be an enormous challenge
to create an analytical center whose judgments were not only fair, but perceived to be fair even by partisans dead sure they are

think of the potential of such a system to

improve the signal-to-noise ratio, to sharpen public debate, to shift attention
from blowhards to experts worthy of an audience, and to improve public policy . At a minimum, it would
right and the other guys are wrong. But

highlight how often our forecasts and expectations fail, and if that were to deflate the bloated confidence of experts and leaders,

the pessimists are

right, too, that fallibility, error, and tragedy are permanent
conditions of our existence. Humility is in order, or, as Socrates said, the beginning of wisdom is the admission of
and give pause to those preparing some great leap forward, it would be money well spent. But

ignorance. The Socratic message has always been a hard sell, and it still isespecially among practical people in business and
politics, who expect every presentation to end with a single slide consisting of five bullet points labeled The Solution. We have no

But in defense of Socrates, humility is the foundation of the fox style of thinking and
is an essential component of good judgment in our
uncertain world. It is practical. Over the long term, it yields better
calibrated probability judgments, which should help you affix more
realistic odds than your competitors on policy bets panning out.
such slide, unfortunately.

much research suggests it