Physician Assisted Death
Update 11.17.09: A video of Bob Liston from ADAPT speaking about Physician Assisted Suicide.
Establish a constitutional right to live with dignity, not physician assisted suicide.
On December 5, 2008, Judge Dorothy McCarter, Montana First Judicial District Court Judge, ruled the Montana constitutional rights of individual privacy and human dignity, taken together, encompass the right of a competent terminally ill patient to die with dignity. That a patient may use the assistance of his physician to obtain a lethal dose of medication that the patient may take when he/she decides to terminate his/her life. The Court also concluded that the patient’s physician is protected from liability under the State’s homicide statutes. See Baxter v State of Montana.
Disability Rights Montana disagrees with the lower court’s decision and wrote an amicus brief urging the Montana Supreme Court to reverse the District Court’s Decision.
DRM believes that the lower court erred in its failure to consider the impact of a constitutional right to end ones life in a flawed health care system where there is no balancing constitutional right to receive healthcare. People with disabilities disproportionately live in poverty and have limited health care. Therefore the decision to seek assistance in dying may not be the result of free choice but dictated by limits on insurance coverage and economic pressure. People who might overcome their despair with supports may instead choose death as a result of the lack of feasible alternatives. This, we believe, would be coercive.
Disability Rights Montana investigated 11 situations in which the withdrawal of life sustaining treatment was being considered for people with disabilities. These 11 people were determined by their treating physician to be terminal, however, upon closer examination, only one of the eleven was in fact in a terminal condition.
Nine of these eleven people are alive today because of DRM’s intervention. We documented these cases in a written report, Withdrawal of Life Sustaining Treatment, Eleven Case Summaries. Based on our experience in these eleven cases, the lower court is mistaken in its assertion that “whether a patient is terminally ill can be determined by a physician.” A diagnosis of a terminal condition carries significant weight and influences a patient and family about further treatment. When the diagnosis is wrong or based on the assessed quality of life, there is a substantial risk that a person with a disability, who is not terminal, will be prematurely and mistakenly offered assisted death instead of offered active life sustaining treatment.
Until Montana establishes a constitutional right to health care, to include palliative and hospice care, a right to physician assisted suicide or aid in dying cannot be implemented without substantial risk of premature death to people with disabilities and people who are economically disadvantaged.
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