Assisted Dying – Page 41 – The Amateur's Guide To Death & Dying

July 25, 2015

California Judge Throws Out Lawsuit On Medically Assisted Suicide

By April Dembosky

Christy O'Donnell, who has advanced lung cancer, is one of several California patients suing for the right to get a doctor's help with prescription medicine to end their own lives if and when they feel that's necessary. — Christy O’Donnell, who has advanced lung cancer, is one of several California patients suing for the right to get a doctor’s help with prescription medicine to end their own lives if and when they feel that’s necessary.

Three terminally ill patients lost a court battle in California Friday over whether they should have the right to request and take lethal medication to hasten their deaths.

San Diego Superior Court Judge Gregory Pollack said he would dismiss the case, adding that the issues were beyond his role as a judge to decide and should instead be put to the California state legislature or voters to establish new law.

Plaintiffs vowed to appeal the ruling.

“This is certainly frustrating, but it’s a temporary setback,” said Elizabeth Wallner, a plaintiff in the case, who has been diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer. “I am optimistic that we’ll prevail in the end. It’s too big of an issue to leave uncovered.”

Wallner began a series of treatments for her cancer in 2011, including surgeries to remove her colon and parts of her liver, radiation, and numerous rounds of chemotherapy. In the midst of this, when her son was 16, she realized that she wanted to have control over her own death.

“I was throwing up in the bathroom and my son was taking care of me,” she said. “I looked over at his face and I saw him absolutely stricken, watching his mother experience this. I thought, that’s enough — my son doesn’t need to see this. I should have the right to make that decision when it’s time.”

The case she and others brought to the court seeks to challenge current California law (Section 401 of the state penal code), which makes it a crime to deliberately aid or advise another person to commit suicide. Wallner and the other patients say the law prohibits their doctors from discussing or prescribing medications that could end their lives; and that prohibition, they say, violates their rights to privacy, liberty, and free speech under the California Constitution.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs — the three patients and a physician — argue that the option to hasten death is an extension of previously recognized legal rights to make end-of-life decisions, including the right to refuse life-sustaining treatments, like a feeding tube or ventilator.

“When you’re suffering, and you know you’re going to die anyway, it should be up to you to decide when enough is enough,” said Kevin Diaz, an attorney and director of legal affairs for the advocacy group Compassion & Choices, which is representing the plaintiffs. “We’ll keep trying anyway we can to make sure this is an option.”

But California Attorney General Kamala Harris, one of the defendants in the case, argued that there is no right to assisted suicide embedded in California law. Health statutes that protect patients’ rights to withdraw treatment, Harris said, do not include a right to provide proactive assistance to end someone’s life.

“No court has ever extended the right to privacy to encompass an affirmative medical intervention to kill oneself,” Julie Trinh, deputy attorney general, wrote in a legal brief.

She wrote that while the court has sympathized in the past with the plight of the terminally ill, it concluded that the question of allowing physician-assisted suicide is a legislative matter, rather than a judicial one.

The judge in this case agreed. He said he would issue a formal ruling on Monday.

A bill that aims to legalize physician-assisted suicide in California (SB 128) has been tabled for the rest of the year, after stalling in the Assembly Health Committee. Several attempts in other states to pass a similar bill this year have failed.

The practice is legal in five states: The courts authorized the practice in Montana and New Mexico; Vermont passed a law in its legislature; and voters approved ballot measures in Washington and Oregon.

There is one other lawsuit pending in California.

The three patients who are plaintiffs in the case dismissed Friday are worried that the legal process will be too slow to provide relief for them. Christy O’Donnell, a single mother from Santa Clarita, Calif., who is dying from lung cancer, explains her situation in the video below, released earlier this year.

O’Donnell broke down in tears after Friday’s hearing. “I don’t have much time left to live,” she said. “These options are urgent for me.”
Complete Article HERE!

July 7, 2015

Lawmakers Stall California Doctor-Assisted Suicide Bill Amid Religious Fight

Legislation that would have allowed terminally ill patients to legally end their lives in California stalled Tuesday amid fierce opposition from religious groups.

The authors of the right-to-die bill did not present the legislation to the Assembly Health Committee as scheduled because it did not have enough votes to advance.

The panel includes multiple Democratic lawmakers from heavily Catholic districts in the Los Angeles area, where the archdiocese actively opposed the legislation.

“We continue to work with Assembly members to ensure they are comfortable with the bill,” Democratic Sens. Bill Monning of Carmel and Lois Wolk of Davis, and Assemblywoman Susan Eggman of Stockton said in a joint statement. “We remain committed to passing the End of Life Option Act for all Californians who want and need the option of medical aid in dying.”

Christian Burkin, a spokesman for Eggman, said the bill could not meet the deadline to pass committees this year while lawmakers remained uncomfortable with the bill.

Religious groups say allowing doctors to prescribe life-ending drugs is assisted suicide and goes against God’s will. Religious opposition helped defeat similar legislation in California in 2007.

Montana, Oregon, Vermont and Washington have court decisions or laws permitting doctors to prescribe life-ending drugs. A court ruling is pending in New Mexico.

Aid-in-dying advocates hoped the tide would turn after national publicity surrounding 29-year-old Brittany Maynard, who moved from California to Oregon to legally end her life in November following a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer.

In widely viewed videos and national media appearances, she said she deserved to get life-ending drugs in her home state of California. Maynard’s family members advocated for the right-to-die bill in Sacramento after her death.

The bill had advanced out of the state Senate on a mostly party-line vote, with Democrats in support and Republicans opposed.

California’s bill was modeled on Oregon’s law, which has been used in more than 750 deaths since voters approved it in 1994. Advocates for people with disabilities say terminally ill patients could be pressured to end their lives to avoid burdening their families.

The California Medical Association had dropped its decades-long opposition to aid-in-dying legislation, saying the decision should be left up to individual doctors if they want to help patients end their lives.

Legislatures in Maine and Colorado have rejected right-to-die bills this year. Similar efforts have stalled in other states.

Complete Article HERE!

July 7, 2015

California’s controversial assisted-death bill divides doctors

When the California Medical Association removed its long-standing objection to assisted death in May, it seemed to clear a legislative path for Senate Bill 128, which would allow physicians to provide lethal drugs to patients with less than six months to live.

But the powerful doctors group’s neutral position has not quelled the controversy, either among lawmakers or in the medical community. After passing the state Senate last month, SB 128 could meet its end during a hearing Tuesday in the Assembly Health Committee, where it stalled two weeks ago over growing objections from Latino Democrats.

Nearly 18 years after Oregon enacted the country’s first assisted-death law, doctors also remain strongly divided over the ethics of the policy. Does it provide patients with a personal choice to end their suffering, or violate a physician’s oath to do no harm? The answer can be deeply personal.

Pro: ‘We treat our pets better than we treat our loved ones’

Dr. Michael Amster, a pain-management specialist in Fairfield, deals with dying patients every day.

But he was unfamiliar with assisted death before last year, when a college friend who lived in Oregon came to the end of a debilitating two-year battle with gynecological cancer. As his friend considered taking advantage of the state’s law, Amster said she found a “peace of mind knowing that she could end her suffering if it got too unbearable.”

“She shared that, because of that, she was able to live her life more fully in the present moment and not worry about the future and the unknowns,” Amster said. Though his friend died too quickly to use Oregon’s law, “watching what she went through woke me up to understanding the value of having this option available in the end-of-life process.”

Amster has since become an advocate for assisted death in California, urging lawmakers to pass SB 128. He sees it as an issue of personal choice and autonomy in health care, rather than as physicians assisting patients to commit suicide, as some opponents have framed it.

“All it does is hasten a natural process,” he said.

Opponents have pointed to existing palliative care and pain management options as better ways to help dying patients in their final days. But Amster said available medications don’t work for everyone or can provide a poor quality of life, leaving people delirious and sedated.

He draws a contrast between sick animals, who are put down when their suffering becomes too great, and people, who are left to ride out the natural course of their dying process until their bodies finally shut down.

“We treat our pets better than we treat our loved ones, is what it comes down to,” he said. “There needs to be another option for people that are really stuck and suffering greatly.”

If SB 128 becomes law, Amster would be open to prescribing the medication. He said he already has those conversations with patients who come to him seeking help in dying, but he has to be “clear with them the boundaries” about what is legal.

That hit home last year as another friend of Amster’s in Davis was dying of ovarian cancer. She explored the possibility of moving to Oregon, but didn’t have enough time left to establish residency, so she began to talk about ending her own life in a “ritual” surrounded by loved ones.

“I watched my friend and her husband horrified and scared about, you know, if she chose to take all of her hospice medication and overdose and die, like, could he be thrown in jail if he knew about this?” Amster said.

When his friend began consulting Amster about how she might overdose, he said he had to make the difficult decision to distance himself.

“As a friend and someone who loved her, I wanted to help her end her suffering,” he said. “But ethically and with my license and what I felt what was the right thing, there was nothing I could do to help her.”

Amster hopes that legalizing assisted death in California will bring those conversations about dying into the open, and get people thinking about their own wishes.

“What are our values? What do we consider humane treatment for someone who’s at the end of their life?” he said. “Is that really suicide, or is that compassion?”

Con: Focus on improving hospice care

Dr. Daniel Mirda, a hematology and oncology specialist in Napa, tries to take the fear out of cancer treatment.

“I can’t tell you how many times a person comes to me and they’re very afraid of their illness and they’re facing a lot of possible disasters,” he said. “Yet oftentimes having a plan simplifies their life, helps them deal with it and better understand what to do.”

He takes the same approach with SB 128, which he has testified against as president of the Association of Northern California Oncologists.

While Mirda understands why someone facing a lethal and debilitating illness might want to “head it off at the pass,” he sees his role as providing patients with the best options possible for living their “most productive life” going forward.

“I don’t think in the same sitting I can tell you how to fight your cancer and this is how you end the fight,” he said.

Mirda shares some of the ethical concerns that other opponents of assisted death have expressed: Would the socioeconomically challenged be more likely to choose this option because medical therapies are too expensive? How much sway would a patient’s family have over their decision? Would it be overused?

He also objects to cutting short the process of dying, which he believes can be an important time for patients and their families.

“When you first find out you have an illness, the last thing you want to do is kill yourself,” Mirda said. Then as time goes on and people deal with the consequences, they can assess their quality of life and decide whether to keep seeking treatment.

“This idea of getting ready for death is sometimes as valuable to people as doing therapy to avoid it,” he said. “How are you going to spend that time that you have left?”

For loved ones, there’s a chance to say goodbye.

Mirda’s mother-in-law died from acute leukemia last month. At first, he said, the family wanted her to live longer. But as she developed various complications from the cancer, everyone was integrated into her struggle and eventually understood that she could no longer keep fighting it.

He compares it to his father’s sudden death many years ago, which left him in the lurch. When his mother-in-law finally died, the family was “kind of at peace.”

“You have done everything possible to help this individual,” he said. “There are no regrets at all.”

Mirda would rather that California focus on improving hospice care, which he regards as a “totally supportive environment” for both dying patients and those they are leaving behind.

“That to me is really where the real effort would have to be exerted – respecting the individual, but then respecting who this is going to affect that moves on,” he said.

If lawmakers pass SB 128, however, Mirda said he would at least make sure that his patients are informed of their options and free to choose for themselves. Whether he could prescribe the medication himself may depend on his relationship with the patient who asks.

“Could I do that if faced with it? We’ll have to see,” he said. “It would almost have to be as individual as the decision itself.”

Complete Article HERE!

July 1, 2015

‘End of Life Option Act’ Offers Death with Dignity for Trans Man

California legislators and the Compassion and Choices coalition are pushing for a bill allowing terminally ill patients to shorten the inevitable dying process

BY KAREN OCAMB

In 1996, on the cusp of the lifesaving three-drug HIV cocktail, Eric Roberts starred inIt’s My Party by director Randal Kleiser, one of the first films to feature a gay man who not only insists on dying with dignity but doing so with a festive, emotional flare.

Roberts’ character had been diagnosed with an aggressive disease that would rob him of his mental acuity months before he would actually die, so he wants a goodbye party while he can still recognize the ones he loves. The film was Kleiser’s tribute to his own ex-lover, who died of AIDS in 1992.

In the film Roberts had a brain disease, so he still looked young, fit and beautiful. Most gays with AIDS surrendered vanity early on as their once-worshipped bodies were ravaged by the wasting syndrome or the purple lesions of Kaposi’s Sarcoma. They were rendered helpless and unrecognizable to themselves, an agony sometimes worse than the unrelenting physical pain. Death was a welcome blessing, and many were quietly helped to that end by bereft loving friends, lovers and family, despite the pall of illegality.

It was in this context that efforts to legalize physician-assisted suicide in California were launched in 1992, 1995 and 1999. But the prospect of a dying person choosing a good death became highly politicized by the religious right with the Florida case of Terri Schiavo, where Gov. Jeb Bush sided with the family and ordered her life prolonged, despite the wishes of her husband who said his wife expressly said she wouldn’t want to be kept alive in a vegetative state.

Today there is another effort underway in the California Legislature to pass a well-crafted bill—modeled on the successful death-with-dignity bill in Oregon—that even won the support of conservative Democrat U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and the California Medical Association, which ended its opposition after 28 years. On June 4, the State Senate passed the End of Life Option Act, SB 128, by 23 to 14, buoyed by a poll last year showing that nearly two-thirds of Californians favor giving a terminally ill patient the option to die peacefully. Currently Washington, Montana, Vermont and New Mexico also have medical-aid-in-dying laws.

Co-authors Senate Majority Leader Bill Monning and Senate Majority Whip Lois Wolk, with support from the Compassion & Choices Coalition, introduced SB 128 last January. The bill has a “checklist” of safeguards to prohibit the possibility of abuse. Essentially the bill would allow a mentally competent, terminally ill adult (18 or over) the option of requesting (both orally and in writing) a doctor’s prescription for medication to shorten the inevitable dying process so they might die peacefully, without pain.

“I’m doing everything I can to extend my life. No one should have the right to extend my death,” out State Sen. Mark Leno recalls one woman dying of lung cancer saying during a Senate hearing on the bill. Leno is a principal co-author of SB 128.

“I happen to be of the philosophical belief that government should not come between an individual and a decision he or she may make with a physician,” Leno says during a phone interview with Frontiers. “There is nothing more personal and of greater importance than our end-of-life choices. I don’t think government should be in the way. That’s what this bill does. It provides a choice for someone in a very specific situation.”

Leno knows something about this. He lost his partner Doug in 1990 and Doug’s younger brother in 1986. “Those of us of a certain age,” Leno says, “saw the tortured deaths of hundreds of friends” at a time when there was no hope of surviving. “So I’ve seen firsthand how cruel that can be.” And with aging parents and siblings approaching their last years, “it becomes a very real issue all over again.”

Leno says he found it “astounding” that a Republican colleague described his opposition to the bill by suggesting a terminally ill patient could drive over a cliff or shoot themselves in the temple instead. “The level of insensitivity is so extreme,” he says.

Michael Saum, a 35-year-old transgender man who is dying from brain cancer (pictured in photo above with best friend Julia), wishes he had that option. Saum’s doctors think he will die in the next few months, before the bill reaches Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk.

“It’s not that I want to die; I don’t want to die,” Michael tells Frontiers. “I love life, but I don’t want to live like this.”

Saum was battling cancer for 14 years before going into remission—an 18-month respite during which he took the opportunity to become the man he always felt himself to be. His mother, who had been fine when then-Heidi came out as a lesbian, could not handle his transition. When he was diagnosed with Stage IV brain cancer that had spread throughout his body, he turned to his lesbian friends, most importantly his best friend Julia, whom he had once dated, to provide him refuge in her El Monte home and to take care of him. “It’s the kind of love I can’t even describe. She’s selfless,” he says.

Saum is currently at the strongest dose of painkiller allowed, but it’s not working. He has severe headaches, nausea, unregulated body temperature, short-term memory loss, unfiltered speech—“so many things go wrong” having big tumors in both the left and right frontal lobes.

“I’m in terrible pain every day, to the point that I’m crying nearly every day,” he says. “I’ve been told by my doctor that there is no chance for change, no miracle; no treatment is going to heal me.

“I think I’m going to pass before this bill is enacted,” Saum says, “but if it’s not there for me, I’m grateful I’m able to help others in my situation.”

Out Assemblymember Susan Eggman, Chair of the LGBT Legislative Caucus, is the lead principal co-author in the Assembly. A former hospice social worker who also lost friends in the ‘80s and ‘90s and cared for family members as they lay dying, she is uniquely positioned to understand the significance of SB 128.

“I come at this from a lot of different perspectives,” Eggman tells Frontiers. I believe—and I think polling shows—that Californians are ready for this.” Additionally, 17 years of research out of Oregon show that there is virtually no coercion or abuse.

“We know that oftentimes people don’t even go through with it. They just know that they have that option,” Eggman says. The bill is not for people who are depressed or seniors or disabled. “This is for somebody with a terminal illness, for which no cure is expected, and their end-of-life trajectory is within six months to a year.”

And, she notes, the End of Life Option Act is “for those who have had a certain degree of control in their life—this is something that is important to them.”

Perhaps more people than the dying and their loves ones are beginning to grasp the moral and ethical urgency of this bill. In a sharp contrast to the political and religious-based Schiavo controversy, a bipartisan poll conducted June 16-21 shows that nearly seven out of 10 Californians (69%) support SB 128, and that includes Catholics (60%), non-evangelical Protestants (65%) and evangelical Christians (57%).

Eggman is holding a hearing on the bill on July 7. The deadline to pass SB 128 in the Assembly is September 11.
Complete Article HERE!

June 25, 2015

The right to die

IT IS easy to forget that adultery was a crime in Spain until 1978; or that in America, where gay marriage is allowed by 37 states and may soon be extended to all others by the Supreme Court, the last anti-sodomy law was struck down only in 2003. Yet, although most Western governments no longer try to dictate how consenting adults have sex, the state still stands in the way of their choices about death. An increasing number of people—and this newspaper—believe that is wrong.

The argument is over the right to die with a doctor’s help at the time and in the manner of your own choosing. As yet only a handful of European countries, Colombia and five American states allow some form of doctor-assisted dying. But draft bills, ballot initiatives and court cases are progressing in 20 more states and several other countries (see article). In Canada the Supreme Court recently struck down a ban on helping patients to die; its ruling will take effect next year. In the coming months bills will go before parliaments in Britain and Germany.

The idea fills its critics with dismay. For some, the argument is moral and absolute. Deliberately ending a human life is wrong, because life is sacred and the endurance of suffering confers its own dignity. For others, the legalisation of doctor-assisted dying is the first step on a slippery slope where the vulnerable are threatened and where premature death becomes a cheap alternative to palliative care.

These views are deeply held and deserve to be taken seriously. But liberty and autonomy are sources of human dignity, too. Both add to the value of a life. In a secular society, it is odd to buttress the sanctity of life in the abstract by subjecting a lot of particular lives to unbearable pain, misery and suffering. And evidence from places that have allowed assisted dying suggests that there is no slippery slope towards widespread euthanasia. In fact, the evidence leads to the conclusion that most of the schemes for assisted dying should be bolder.

Nothing is hurt, nothing is lost

The popular desire for assisted dying is beyond question. The Economist asked Ipsos MORI to survey people in 15 countries on whether doctors should be allowed to help patients to die, and if so, how and when. Russia and Poland are against, but we find strong support across America and western Europe for allowing doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to patients with terminal diseases. In 11 out of the 15 countries we surveyed, most people favoured extending doctor-assisted dying to patients who are in great physical suffering but not close to death.

No wonder that, just as adultery existed in Spain before 1978, so too many doctors help their patients die even if the law bans them from doing so. Usually this is by withdrawing treatment or administering pain-relief in lethal doses. Often doctors act after talking to patients and their relatives. Occasionally, when doctors overstep the mark, they are investigated, though rarely charged. Some people welcome this fudge because it establishes limits to doctor-assisted dying without the need to articulate the difficult moral choices this involves.

But this approach is unethical and unworkable. It is unethical because an explicit choice that should lie with the patient is wholly in the hands of a doctor. It is hypocritical because society is pretending to shun doctor-assisted dying while tacitly condoning it without safeguards. What may turn out to be more important, this system is also becoming impractical. Most deaths now take place in hospital, under teams of doctors who are working with closer legal and professional oversight. Death by nods and winks is no good.

Better is to face the arguments. One fear is that assisted dying will be foisted on vulnerable patients, bullied by rogue doctors, grasping relatives, miserly insurers or a cash-strapped state. Experience in Oregon, which has had a law since 1997, suggests otherwise. Those who choose assisted suicide are in fact well-educated, insured and receiving palliative care. They are motivated by pain, as well as the desire to preserve their own dignity, autonomy and pleasure in life.

Another fear is that assisted dying will downgrade care. But Belgium and Holland have some of the best palliative care in Europe. Surveys show that doctors are as trusted in countries with assisted dying as they are in those without. And there are scant signs of a slippery slope. In Oregon only 1,327 people have received lethal medicine—and just two-thirds of those have used it to take their lives. Assisted dying now accounts for about 3% of deaths in the Netherlands—a large number—but this is less a rush to assisted dying than the coming to light of an unspoken tradition in which doctors quietly brought their patients’ lives to an end.

Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow

How, then, should assisted dying work? For many the model is Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act. It allows (but does not oblige) doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to patients with less than six months to live who ask for them, if a second doctor agrees. There is a cooling-off period of 15 days.

We would go further. Oregon insists that the lethal dose is self-administered, to avoid voluntary euthanasia. To the patient the moral distinction between taking a pill and asking for an injection is slight. But the practical consequence of this stricture is to prevent those who are incapacitated from being granted help to die. Not surprisingly, some of the fiercest campaigners for doctor-assisted dying suffer from ailments such as motor neurone disease, which causes progressive paralysis. They want to know that when they are incapacitated, they will be granted help to die, if that is their wish. Allowing doctors to administer the drugs would ensure this.

Oregon’s law covers only conditions that are terminal. Again, that is too rigid. The criterion for assisting dying should be a patient’s assessment of his suffering, not the nature of his illness. Some activists for the rights of the disabled regard the idea that death could be better than a chronic condition as tantamount to declaring disabled people to be of lesser worth. We regard it as an expression of their autonomy. So do many disabled people. Stephen Hawking has described keeping someone alive against his wishes as the “ultimate indignity”.

One exception to this distinction should be children. The decision of whether to endure chronic conditions should be left until adulthood. But, as with adults, children facing imminent death from terminal diseases should, in consultation with their parents and doctors, have the right to be spared their last agonising hours.

The hardest question is whether doctor-assisted dying should be available for those in mental anguish. No one wants to make suicide easier for the depressed: many will recover and enjoy life again. But mental pain is as real as physical pain, even though it is harder for onlookers to gauge. And even among the terminally ill, the suffering that causes some to seek a quicker death may not be physical. Doctor-assisted death on grounds of mental suffering should therefore be allowed.

Because patients’ judgments may be ill-informed and states of mind can change, especially among the mentally ill, society should help people to die only when safeguards are in place. These should include mandatory counselling about alternatives, such as pain relief, psychotherapy and palliative care; a waiting period, to ensure that the intention is enduring; and a face-to-face consultation with a second, independent medical expert to confirm the patient’s prognosis and capacity. In cases of mental suffering the safeguards should be especially strong.

The most determined people do not always choose wisely, no matter how well they are counselled. But it would be wrong to deny everyone the right to assisted death for this reason alone. Competent adults are allowed to make other momentous, irrevocable choices: to undergo a sex change or to have an abortion. People deserve the same control over their own death. Instead of dying in intensive care under bright lights and among strangers, people should be able to end their lives when they are ready, surrounded by those they love.
Complete Article HERE!

June 22, 2015June 22, 2015

A humane way to end life

Deborah Ziegler holds a photo of her daughter, Brittany Maynard, with her husband Gary Holmes after the California Senate passed a bill allowing physicians to assist in the death of terminally ill patients.

LESS THAN a month before she died, Brittany Maynard posted a video explaining her decision to move to Oregon to take advantage of the state’s law allowing terminally ill people to end their own lives. Maynard, 29, had been diagnosed with an aggressive and terminal brain cancer and said she wanted to die on her own terms. “I hope to pass in peace,” she said. Her video, viewed more than 9 million times in the first month, and her death, after she ingested medication prescribed by a doctor, helped fuel a national movement for “death with dignity.”

In addition to Oregon, four other states — Washington, Vermont, New Mexico and Montana — allow physicians to provide aid in dying. After Ms. Maynard’s death in November, lawmakers in more than 20 states and the District — backed by advocates Compassion and Choices, and the Death with Dignity National Center — introduced end-of-life legislation. In many cases, the bills are pending; in states where they didn’t advance, including Maryland, lawmakers vowed to try again. A recent Gallup poll showed nearly seven in 10 Americans agree that terminally ill adults should have the right to medical assistance in bringing about a peaceful death.

Closely watched are events in California. Ms. Maynard lived there before moving to Oregon and in her final days she videotaped a plea to lawmakers to adopt a law similar to Oregon’s and lobbied California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) by phone. After the state medical association recently dropped its long-standing opposition, a measure passed the state Senate and is set for a hearing this month in the lower house; a lawsuit — a route successfully used in New Mexico and Montana — also is being pressed with the claim that both the state constitution and existing state law allow the medical practice of aid in dying.

Meanwhile, D.C. Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3) has sponsored a bill modeled on Oregon’s law for the nation’s capital. That has the potential to bring Congress into the debate.

The issue stirs strong emotions. Some opponents, including the Catholic Church, cite religious or moral grounds, seeing any form of assisted dying as anathema to teachings that life is never to be taken. Some physicians believe the practice violates their oath only to heal, and some disability rights activists fear that they will be vulnerable to abuses. Others warn of a slippery slope to euthanasia.

Oregon’s 18 years of experience do not confirm any of these fears. Enacted in 1997, Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act allows terminally ill adults who are residents of the state to obtain and use prescriptions from their physicians for self-administered lethal doses. Stringent protections include a life expectancy of less than six months, a finding of mental capability, a concurring opinion from a second doctor, mandatory discussion of hospice and other options, waiting periods and more.

Oregonians have made sparing use of the law, with 859 deaths as of Feb. 2 . The state collects data on each case, and there have been no reports of coerced or wrongly qualified assisted deaths. The typical patient is about 71, suffering from terminal cancer, well-educated, with health insurance and enrolled in hospice. About one-third of prescriptions were never used, suggesting some terminally ill people are comforted by knowing they have an alternative to extensive suffering should they need it.

Such suffering has been described by Diane Rehm, the WAMU-FM radio host. Her husband, incapacitated by Parkinson’s disease and without an Oregon-style option, starved himself to death over an agonizing 10 days. Barbara Blalock, a Rockville doctor, said at a joint Maryland legislative committee hearing that she has had patients ask, “Is there a way that we can avoid intolerable suffering at the end of life?” Dr. Blalock said she often has to say no, “and I always felt as a physician I was failing them in some way.” Ms. Maynard said of her decision: “I do not want to die. But I am dying. And I want to die on my own terms.”

Death with dignity laws need to be carefully thought out, written and monitored. Oregon and the states that followed its example show that such care is possible. We hope the rest of the nation catches up with this humane option for life’s end.
Complete Article HERE!

June 14, 2015

Maine to step into debate over ‘death-with-dignity’ laws

BY ALANNA DURKIN

A divisive national debate over whether dying patients should have the power to end their own lives will sweep into Maine this week when the Republican-controlled state Senate begins to consider so-called “death-with-dignity” legislation.

Sen. Roger Katz’s bill, which the Republican from Augusta says the Senate could take up as early as Monday, is modeled after legislation passed in Vermont two years ago that allows physicians to provide lethal doses of medication to terminally ill patients who want to hasten their death. Katz and other supporters say those who are suffering should be free to end their lives on their terms.

“Why not have the right to say, ‘I want to go, I’ve had it’?” said 85-year-old June Wagner, whose daughter died in 2012 at the age of 54 after suffering from ovarian cancer. Her daughter lived in Washington state, which has such a law, and obtained a prescription to end her own life, but Wagner said she doesn’t know if she ultimately used it.

Maine would become the sixth state in the country with such a law if Katz’s bill passes this year, but it faces an uphill battle. Lawmakers here have repeatedly rejected similar measures and voters defeated a ballot referendum on the issue in 2000.

It has been met with fierce opposition from some religious and medical groups, including the Maine Medical Association and the American Nurses Association of Maine, who say lawmakers should focus instead on ensuring that all residents have access to proper health care that can make them comfortable in the final months of their lives. Others say they fear patients will feel the need to end their own life because they believe they’re a burden on their families.

Suzanne Lafreniere, director of the office of public policy for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland told lawmakers earlier this year that a person’s life must be protected “at every stage and in every condition.”

“A law permitting assisted suicide would demean the lives of vulnerable patients and expose them to exploitation by those who feel they are better off dead,” she said in her written testimony.

Brittany Maynard thrust the issue back into the national spotlight last year she ended her own life just before her 30th birthday in Oregon, the first state to legalize the practice. Maynard, who was dying of brain cancer, advocated for aid-in-dying laws in videos shared widely online.

Kandyce Powell, who opposes the bill and is executive director of the Maine Hospice Council, said she believes the proposal wouldn’t resurface so frequently if more people in Maine had proper access to end-of-life care.

Vast rural parts of the state lack hospice or palliative care that can ease a person’s suffering in the final stages of their life, Dr. James VanKirk, medical director of palliative care services at Eastern Maine Medical Center.

“I am not against people having choice. That’s what we’re all about in this country,” VanKirk said. “But I think if we’re going to give people this kind of choice … we need to make sure that they really have a choice. We need to make sure that they don’t feel like they are in a situation where there is only one option.”

Katz agreed that expanding access to health care is crucial, but palliative care may not make things bearable for everyone, he said. He stressed that his proposal includes many safeguards, including requirements that a second doctor has confirmed that the patient has a limited time to live.

He’s hopeful that the national discussion and the increased awareness of the issue over the last year will help propel his bill into law — if not this year, sometime soon.

“There are some people who have religious objections or other moral objections and I respect that,” Katz said. “But I think that most people have an open mind and are waiting to hear the debate.”
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