Linda Fleming, a 66-year-old, legally bankrupt cancer patient living alone in Sequim, Wash., recently became the first person to kill herself under her state's new assisted-suicide law. As in neighboring Oregon, where a similar law has facilitated more than 400 suicides since 1997, the measure that paved the way for Fleming's death allows suicidal adults to obtain lethal prescriptions as long as they are competent and have been diagnosed with a terminal condition by two physicians.
Assisted-suicide advocates hail such laws as progressive and liberating. Yet even in Washington, where 58 percent of voters approved the assisted-suicide measure last fall, many critics remain unconvinced.
They worry that such laws will change a doctor's role from healer to executioner. They fret that the assisted-suicide push will siphon resources from palliative care and confirm severely ill patients' suspicions that their lives are burdensome and worthless. And they fear that, as our society struggles to care for an aging population in a worsening economy, the right to die could morph into a duty to die.
Their fears are well-founded. Consider the case of Barbara Wagner, an Oregon woman who was diagnosed with a recurrence of lung cancer last year at age 64. Her survival prospects were grim, but her oncologist offered her one final hope: a $4,000-a-month drug that could slow the cancer's growth and give her another four to six months to live. Wagner, a great-grandmother and retired bus driver living in a low-income apartment, could not afford the drug herself. So she asked her state-run health insurance plan for help.
The response she received shocked her. Oregon state officials sent a letter saying that they would not pay for medication to extend her life, but they would foot the drug bill for an assisted suicide -- an expenditure of roughly $50.
Assisted-suicide laws like the one in Wagner's state are a potential boon to tight-fisted insurers and bureaucrats looking to cut health care costs. And the growing acceptance of assisted suicide and euthanasia, even in states that do not explicitly permit them, makes it easier for frustrated physicians and caregivers to convince themselves and others that severely ill and disabled patients would be better off dead.
Just this month in Wisconsin, a disability-rights group filed a lawsuit against the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics after doctors there withheld treatment for pneumonia from two developmentally disabled patients, apparently because the patients had low "quality of life." Neither was in a persistent vegetative state and, in the case of one patient, family members who initially agreed with the doctor's recommendation to withhold food and medication reconsidered when their relative awoke and asked to eat. According to the lawsuit, the doctor balked at the family's request to restart treatment, and they felt pressured to hasten their loved one's death.
Another unnerving Wisconsin case made headlines last year when a state appeals court ruled that the wife and the adult daughter of a terminally ill man who shot himself could inherit his estate even if they helped him end his life. According to the Associated Press, the man's other children had contested his will, alleging that the wife and daughter, knowing he was suicidal, had taken him to a cabin, given him a loaded shotgun and left him alone. The court said that even if the allegations were true, the women could keep his money.
Such rulings defy common sense. Sadly, they are only the beginning of the abuses and ill-considered decisions we will see as the push for assisted suicide spreads from state to state. The ghastly rationale behind that push -- that suicide is the answer to human suffering -- demands a forceful response from the millions of Americans who still believe that every life counts.
WRITTEN by Colleen Carroll Campbell in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and published by the Ethics & Public Policy Center on May 29th, 2009
