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The Right vs. the Right to Die in California

By Rod Mackenzie

A decade ago, after the people of Oregon had passed the Death with Dignity Act, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in declaring it constitutional wrote that people have a right to the option of physician assistance to shorten a “protracted” and/or “agonizing” death.

Compassionate care.jpg Among the many safeguards of this law are the following:

1.Patient must be a resident of the state

2.Patient must be diagnosed with terminal illness within six months of death, by two physicians

3.Request must be voluntary, with no evidence of coercion

4.Patient must make three requests, one in writing, witnessed by someone other than family or primary care-givers

5.There is minimum 15 day waiting period between the first request and the dispensing of medication

6. Patient must be determined to be mentally capable

7. Patient may rescind request at any time

8. Physician will refer patient to counseling, if appropriate, make all treatment options known, and clearly discuss consequences of patient’s request

9. Physician will encourage patient to inform family

10. The Oregon Health Division enforces compliance with the law

This certainly is a rational and safe law, isn’t it? It has been operating for ten years now, without a single case of abuse being found, despite the efforts of the National Right to Life, and local allies, to pursue any opportunity to subjugate us to their personal dogma.

Yet we have not been able to pass a corresponding bill here in California, despite the fact that the law proposed here, would have even more safeguards. One could write a book about the relatively small number of people Right To Life has organized to assist them in their cruel efforts to prevent even dying people from having choice. In fact, Jon Eisenberg, a great lawyer, has done just that in his book, USING TERRI, which was recently published in paperback as “The Right versus The Right To Die.”

It seems that all the Republicans in Sacramento are in the grip of this relatively small but wealthy band of naysayers. It is standard practice to find this cruelty from Right To Life and the Republican party, but there are also some Democrats who are playing ball with them. These Democrats are unable to give rational reasons for their unwillingness to allow choice to dying people. In so doing, they are defying the will of the people, their constituents, 70% or more of whom are decent and wise enough to see that democracy acquires its energy from choice.

I think that we in the Democratic Party must work to change the minds of these legislators quickly, or remove them from office.

Along life's road, Rod Mackenzie has sung in a choir, earned a degree in chemical engineering, taught chemistry, and counseled. He has spent some time with and under the spell of Carl Rogers. This article originally appeared in the LA Progressive and is republished with permission.

Posted on May 21, 2008

Comments

As a very liberal Democrat, I strongly oppose the legalization of assisted suicide. I work for a very liberal national law and policy center on disability rights, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), and like many disability rights organizations, we have opposed legalization for years.

A new study from Michigan Law Review, June 2008, by Doctors Herbert Hendin and Kathleen Foley describes in detail how the practices of the Oregon Public Health Division have undermined safeguards for the care and protection of terminally ill patients under the Oregon law, because it does not collect all the information that is needed to truly monitor the law, and because it acts as the defender of the law rather than as the protector of the welfare of terminally ill patients. The study points out that the implementation of the law has had unintended, harmful consequences for patients because safeguards are circumvented in ways that are harmful to patients, in the following ways:

• There is a failure to ensure that palliative care alternatives to assisted suicide are made available to patients.

• There is inadequacy of safeguards to ensure a patient’s psychiatric health and the voluntariness of the decision.

• There is a greater emphasis on protecting physicians rather than patients.

• The role of advocacy groups for assisted suicide is very problematic.

• Oregon’s current approach to patient requests for death differs from the accepted medical approach both to suicide and to requests for assisted suicide.

Marilyn Golden
Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF)

Posted by: Marilyn Golden at May 21, 2008 06:50 PM

The article I described in the previous comment appears in Michigan Law Review, Volume 10, Issue 8, June, 2008, and can be found at:

http://www.spiorg.org/publications/HendinFoley_MichiganLawReview.pdf

Posted by: Marilyn Golden at May 21, 2008 08:02 PM

As a disabled person, I strongly support the right to die. It's indignant enough to have to have things done for me now. I don't want my disabled son to have to be my care giver, clean me, feed me. I don't want to linger in a nursing home, wheeled in to a shower room once a week, with others, and be sprayed down. I don't want to be placed every morning in a wheel chair, and parked in the hall for hours at a time. To me, that is not even living, let alone with dignity.

Jolene, CA

Posted by: Jolene Noteboom at June 12, 2008 06:29 PM

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