The International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide is a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational organization that concerns itself with the issues of euthanasia, doctor-prescribed suicide, advance directives, assisted suicide proposals, "right-to-die" cases, disability rights, pain control, and related bioethical issues. They oppose the legalization of euthanasia. The executive director of the Task Force is lawyer Rita Marker, author of Deadly Compassion: The Death of Ann Humphry and the Truth About Euthanasia, which puts forth an account of the death of the wife of euthanasia advocate Derek Humphry. In January 2011, The International Task Force changed its name to The Patients Rights Council. Their Frank Reed Memorial Library maintains the most and up-to-date collection in the world of books as well as periodical, newspaper and professional journal articles devoted to euthanasia, doctor-prescribed suicide and end-of-life issues.
Famous quotes containing the words task, force, assisted and/or suicide:
“The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“As a final instance of the force of limitations in the development of concentration, I must mention that beautiful creature, Helen Keller, whom I have known for these many years. I am filled with wonder of her knowledge, acquired because shut out from all distraction. If I could have been deaf, dumb, and blind I also might have arrived at something.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)