DUMMERSTON — Our representatives in the Vermont House will soon take up a bill having to do with end-of-life choice, or patient-directed dying. This action follows the passage of an end-of-life bill by the Senate last month.
Credit is due the Senate for its serious consideration of a carefully written bill based on Oregon's “death with dignity” law and the experience with it over the past 14 years, but the Senate's bill is woefully lacking.
It's a one-page amendment of the original, carefully-crafted 22-page bill and focuses primarily on physician protection rather than giving a terminally ill, mentally competent Vermonter a sound and sensitive way to make a request for, and for a doctor to prescribe, medication that would be self-administered to hasten his or her death.
The House needs to restore to the Senate bill the legal standards and safeguards in the original bill for both patients and doctors to ensure that patients have true end-of-life choices.
For example, the kind of choice needed in the bill is a terminal patient's own informed decision to make after he or she has received counseling on alternative end-of-life services that include hospice care, palliative care, and the kinds of pain control that are available.
The patient should also express desire both orally and in writing for medication to hasten the end of his or her life, and this request should be witnessed by qualified individuals who can attest that he or she is of sound mind, acting voluntarily, and is not being forced to make this request.
Taking control of one's life and ending it in this way is the most serious of decisions a terminal patient can make. It has to be respected and treated as such.
While it might not be the choice for most people, it should be one that's legally available to those whose life is ebbing away in such physical and mental suffering that death becomes more inviting than continuing life that lacks meaningful quality.
I want such a choice to be available if I'm in this kind of terminal condition when my time comes.