Expanding the Right to Physician-Aided Dying?
The Washington Post recently ran an article about efforts underway by some folks to expand Oregon’s physician-aided dying law to include those individuals who do not have terminal illnesses. In Oregon, pushing to give patients with degenerative diseases the right to die explains efforts to expand the scope of Oregon’s law to cover those with degenerative diseases, such as “[p]eople with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, multiple sclerosis and a host of other degenerative diseases [who] are generally excluded from the Oregon law.” Why? you might ask. “[B]ecause some degenerative diseases aren’t fatal. People die with Parkinson’s, for example, not because of it. Other diseases, such as advanced Alzheimer’s, rob people of the cognition they need to legally request the suicide medications.”
The article notes that this effort isn’t limited to just Oregon. In fact, there are “[r]elatively modest drives … afoot in Washington state and California, where organizations have launched education campaigns on how people can fill out instructions for future caregivers to withhold food and drink, thereby carrying out an option that is legal to anybody: death by starvation and dehydration. (It is often referred to as the “voluntarily stopping eating and drinking” method.)”
Interestingly, the article reports that not all in the right to die movement are in favor of broadening the law. In fact “groups such as Compassion & Choices, the nation’s largest right-to-die organization, and the Death With Dignity National Center, a main author of the original law, have little appetite for widening access to lethal drugs in the states where medically assisted suicide already is legal.”
These initiatives aren’t just limited to the U.S. The story reports in Canada The Quebec “provincial government is studying the possibility of legalizing euthanasia for Alzheimer’s patients. Unlike medically assisted suicide, a medical doctor would administer the fatal dose via injection. A survey in September found that 91 percent of the Canadian province’s medical caregivers support the idea.”
The Oregon legislature has taken the first step, the passage last month of legislation to investigate “how to improve the process of creating and carrying out advance directives. Gov. Kate Brown (D) is expected to sign it.”
The article also reminds us of the Harris case where Mrs. Harris, with an advance directive, was spoon fed by the facility where she resided. There have been a number of folks requesting language added to their advance directives to avoid the spoon-feeding issue according to the attorney for Mr. Harris.