More than a dozen states, plus the District of Columbia, are considering controversial medically assisted death legislation this year.
The laws would allow mentally fit, terminally ill patients age 18 and older, whose doctors say they have six months or less to live, to request lethal drugs.
Oregon was the first state to implement its Death with Dignity Act in 1997 after voters approved the law in 1994, and four other states—Montana, New Mexico, Vermont and Washington—now allow for medically assisted death.
As of April 10, at least another 25 states have considered death with dignity bills, according to Compassion & Choices, a Denver-based nonprofit organization that advocates for these laws. Some of those bills already have died in committee.
“The movement has reached a threshold where it is unstoppable,” said President Barbara Coombs of Compassion & Choices, who was also chief petitioner for the Oregon Death with Dignity Act.
The issue of medically assisted death rose to prominence last year with the case of Brittany Maynard, 29, who was told she had six months to live after being diagnosed with brain cancer. Maynard was a strong advocate for Death with Dignity, and when she learned of her grim prognosis, she moved from her home state of California to Oregon where terminally ill patients are allowed to end their own lives.
“I would not tell anyone else that he or she should choose death with dignity,” she wrote in an op-ed on CNN.com. “My question is: Who has the right to tell me that I don’t deserve this choice? That I deserve to suffer for weeks or months in tremendous amounts of physical and emotional pain? Why should anyone have the right to make that choice for me?”
Maynard died on Nov. 1 after taking a lethal prescription provided to her by a doctor under Oregon’s death-with-dignity law.
Many states have proposed these bills, which some advocates call right-to-die legislation, after Maynard’s eventual death in November of last year, but so far none of them have passed.
Coombs, whose organization worked with Maynard to “help carry her voice and her message,” credited Maynard’s advocacy with helping put the issue in the public eye, to the point where legislators are hearing from their constituents that this is a pressing need.
“Brittany Maynard’s death … made it a political issue for younger people, not just older people,” said Arthur Caplan, founding director of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University Langone Medical Center’s Department of Population Health.
The issue has sparked debate with opponents who argue that, given the risk of mistakes or abuse, medically assisted death laws present more dangers than benefits.
“There is a deadly mix when you combine our broken, profit-driven health care system with legalizing assisted suicide,” said Marilyn Golden, a senior policy analyst with the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund.
The possibility of patients being financially or emotionally pressured into a decision to end their own lives is also a major concern, Golden said.
“Assisted suicide automatically becomes the cheapest [treatment] option,” Golden said. “They [patients] are being steered toward hastening their deaths.”
Golden pointed out that the safeguards in place with the legislation in Oregon do not address certain issues, such as doctor shopping, where patients whose physician deems them unfit for lethal medication seek treatment with other doctors who might give them a more favorable answer.
The fact that the legislation does not require the presence of objective witnesses could mean that patients are not willingly self-administering the medication as the law intends, Golden said. It opens up the possibility of elder abuse by heirs or abuse caretakers.
Coombs said the Oregon law has functioned as it was meant to and even has led to unexpected benefits in improving quality of life for terminally ill patients.
“I think the movement is a good thing,” Caplan said. “It has proven to be effective and not abused in Oregon and Washington.”
Many of the people who request the medication never end up taking it though having it allows them to have a sense of security, Caplan said.
With proper checks and balances, the law should not be problematic, he said.
“Between one-third and one-half of patients never take the medication,” Coombs said. “They just derive a lot of peace of mind from having the option.”
Maynard, who received her prescription in May last year, held onto it until November, once she had decided that the suffering had gotten to be too much, she said.
In Oregon between 1997 and 2014, 1,327 people were prescribed lethal medication, 859 of whom died from ingesting the medication, according to the latest data from the Oregon Public Health Division’s yearly report. In Washington state, 549 people received prescriptions under the state’s Death with Dignity Act from 2009 to 2013; 525 of them died, though not all of these deaths are confirmed to have been the result of ingesting the medication, the state Department of Health’s latest report states.
Both Oregon and Washington found that participants had three major concerns: loss of autonomy, diminishing ability to engage in the activities that make life enjoyable, and loss of dignity. Meanwhile, only about a third of patients in both states were concerned about inadequate pain control.
“It’s not as simple as pain,” Coombs said. “Everyone gets to identify their own definition of suffering.”
Similar bills repeatedly have failed to pass either as ballot initiatives or as legislative measures in other states. More than 140 similar proposals in 27 states have failed since 1994, according to the Patients Rights Council.
