The Right to Make the Final Decision

By None, The Seattle Times, Feb. 14, 2006

Editorial

Booth Gardner is the right man to campaign for physician-assisted death in Washington. He opens his campaign at the right time in his life and in this state's political history.

More than a decade ago, America considered assisted death in the person of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who invented a death-dispensing machine. Though he was doing what his patients wanted, Kevorkian created a rather ghoulish atmosphere around the issue. The argument he presented made a good deal of sense, but people recoiled from him. Gardner is radically different. After 14 years of fighting Parkinson's disease, his love of life is obvious. He begins with the simplest Americanism: "I made all the hard decisions in my life." Then he says, "I feel I ought to have the right to make the final decision, which is when and how."

Any suicide will be objectionable to many persons of religion. But the sort of law proposed by Gardner would not require anyone to kill themselves. It would allow it, and for a narrow group only: people who are close to death already.

The measure Gardner will champion for Washington has not been written, but consider the law in Oregon, the only state with such a law. It was passed by the voters twice, the second time with 60-percent approval, and was recently approved by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Oregon's law applies only to residents who are at least 18 years old and of sound mind. Two doctors must vouch that death is no more than six months away. The patient's doctor writes a prescription for barbiturates. The physician can be with the patient when he takes the pills, but the physician cannot administer them. At any time, the patient can change his mind.

Opponents argue that all this is a step toward a "culture of death" that will result in forced euthanasia of the old. Nowhere has this happened.

In Oregon, where more than 30,000 people die each year, the number of assisted deaths in 2004 was 37. In every year since 1998, more lethal prescriptions have been filled than used. In 2004, it was 60 percent more. Some patients want to live as long as they can take it, and they are tougher than they think. Others aren't.

It may be the last important decision they make. As Booth Gardner says, it should be their own.

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