By Paula Span
The New Old Age Blog: Caring and Coping
The New York Times
Originally published May 29, 2012
Consider this an update. Last fall, when I talked with some of the 350 volunteers circulating petitions, they sounded confident about collecting 70,000 certified signatures by the end of the year. They more than succeeded, which meant the state legislature had until May 1 to act. It didn’t — to no one’s surprise — so volunteers for the organization backing the referendum, Dignity 2012, have headed back out with their clipboards.
If they can gather another 11,000 signatures by July 2, the public will decide whether the state’s physicians can lawfully prescribe medications with which terminally ill patients can end their lives. (You can read the exact language here.)
Oregon enacted essentially the same law allowing self-administration of lethal drugs in 1997, and Washington in 2009. Though their adversaries often used “slippery slope” arguments, the number of residents who have taken advantage of the laws remains quite small. After meeting all the requirements and undergoing the mandated waiting periods, 114 people received lethal prescriptions last year in Oregon and 103 in Washington. In both states, about a third of those who qualified ultimately decided not to use the drugs.
But the controversy was intense in those states, with contentious public debate and expensive media campaigns, and it will be this round, too. In both camps, fund-raising has already begun.
“It has potent national implications,” the Rev. J. Brian Hehir, secretary for health care and social services at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, said of the referendum. “We are talking about fundamental human values, deeply personal choices.”
The entire blog entry is here.
