Choice in life, choice in death
Sixty-eight-year-old Peggy Sutherland of Portland, Ore., watched her sister die of the same cancer that had been spreading through her own body. Her sister lost bodily functions. Toward the end, the morphine was no match for the pain.
“That’s not the way I want to die,” Peggy told her children.
One morning, she couldn’t get out of bed. She spent the next three weeks in the hospital. The cancer had spread to her bones. Tumors in her airways restricted her breathing. Her bowels didn’t work. She had known for six months that the cancer was terminal. She made a decision.
“I’m done,” she said. She filled out a request under Oregon law for physician-assisted death, the only such law in the country. Two doctors verified her terminal status and her competency. Sutherland made a second written request 15 days after the first, both signed by two witnesses.
One sunny January morning, in her bed overlooking the Willamette River, Peggy Sutherland listened to her family read poetry by Annie Dillard and the 13th Psalm. She said her goodbyes, drank a lethal dose of narcotics prescribed by her doctor and closed her eyes. Twenty minutes later she was dead.
When Oregon voters passed the Death with Dignity Act in 1994 and again in 1997, opponents warned of state-sanctioned killings of vulnerable elders at the hands of their heirs and of severely disabled people whose care had become too burdensome. But after five years, Oregon has seen none of the abuses that were predicted.
This hasn’t dissuaded U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft from trying to dismantle the law.
Ashcroft was thwarted in his first attempt when, in November 2001, he unilaterally announced that the Oregon law violated federal policy and therefore any doctor assisting in a patient’s death would be criminally liable.
A U.S. District Court judge last April slapped Ashcroft down, saying the attorney general had no authority to make such a directive. Undaunted, Ashcroft has taken the case to the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
To me, this is a no-brainer. Of course you let people choose how to die. They’re not choosing whether to die. They’re terminal; they are going to die. They’re choosing in what manner they will die.
Why can’t we choose, if we are mentally capable, how to spend the last hours of our lives?
Some say only God should decide when life ends. Fine. They should be free to follow their beliefs. But perhaps I find no virtue in suffering, or in the degradation of a body that no longer functions, or in the helpless pain on my family’s faces as they would try to comfort me. I would like the freedom to follow my own beliefs about God and death.
Ashcroft, however, has decided his values should overrule the values of Oregon voters. His primary argument is that assisted suicide is not “legitimate medical practice.” By asking doctors to assist in suicides, he says, we ask them to break their Hippocratic oath to heal and alleviate suffering.
Let’s think this through. For a family to hurry the death of a patient, it needs two doctors willing to approve the bogus request and prescribe the lethal medication to carry it out. So the noble men and women who Ashcroft says cannot be asked to compromise their oath are the same ones he fears are corrupt enough to go along with a greedy family member’s murder scheme.
If Ashcroft prevails in the Ninth Circuit Court, it will be a loss not just for the people of Oregon but for all of us who hope, when our last hour arrives, we can take our leave to the sounds of a swift river and the slowly fading voices of our favorite people.
(Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-mail is [email protected].)