"aid in dying" as political language

I oppose the use of Brittany Maynard's death to redefine English usage.

The attempted redefinition of English usage is part of a larger attempt to change the law. Advocates of this legal change want states to authorize doctors to prescribe lethal drugs for voluntary self-administration in order to cause the death of the person taking the drug or drugs.

Until yesterday, the normal and accepted description of this kind of law in American English would be a law that authorizes doctors to assist with suicide. Fortunately, we still live in a culture in which this kind of language does not poll well. (For example: The bad guys are "suicide bombers," not righteous martyrs choosing death with dignity and honor.) 

To bring about their legal change, then, these advocates are attempting linguistic change. Specifically, they want to change the language we use to think and talk about physician-assisted suicide. They attempt to advance this goal by changing a phrase like "lethal medication" to "aid-in-dying medication," or "laws authorizing physician assistance with suicide" to "laws authorizing aid in dying."

The potential effectiveness of this linguistic change campaign can be seen in the media statement promulgated on Brittany Maynard's death by the advocacy group pushing for this change: "[S]he chose to abbreviate the dying process by taking the aid-in-dying medication she had received months ago." This language has been repeated in several news reports and has also seeped into news reports describing the legal landscape. USA Today, for example, notes that Oregon and four other states "allow patients to seek help from doctors in dying." 

Any decent American journalist these days is surely familiar with Orwell's Politics and the English Language. Twice in that essay, Orwell uses the phrase "political language." He says that "political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness," and that "[p]olitical language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." 

I hope that journalists reporting on the campaign to authorize physician-assisted suicide recognize the political language of "aid in dying" when they see it.