Washington state is the second state to have a voter-approved measure allowing assisted suicide. Under Oregon’s law, affirmed in a 1997 election, more than 340 people, mainly cancer patients, have killed themselves.
A Montana district judge has also ruled that doctor-assisted suicides are legal. The case is now before the Montana Supreme Court. Though Montana doctors are allowed to write lethal prescriptions pending the appeal, there is no reporting process and it is unknown whether any doctors have helped patients commit suicide.
The Portland, Oregon-based group Physicians for Compassionate Care Educational Foundation (PCCEF) argues that allowing doctor assisted suicide undermines trust in the patient-physician relationship and changes the role of the physician from the traditional role of healer to that of the “executioner.”
The group points out that such a “culture shift” endangers the value that society places on life, especially the lives of the most vulnerable and those nearing death.
PCCEF has launched a site encouraging physicians, medical caregivers and concerned citizens to pledge to provide “optimal comfort care” for the terminally ill until “natural death.”
According to a recent edition of the magazine Franciscan Way, PCCEF's president, Dr. Charles Bentz, increased his efforts against assisted suicide after a doctor at a Catholic hospital in Oregon referred one of Bentz’s cancer patients for an assisted suicide.
The Franciscan Way reports that Compassion & Choices had well-placed supporters on Washington newspaper editorial boards and had influenced enough administrators in Catholic hospitals to keep them from opposing Washington’s Initiative 1000.
According to Bentz, the Catholic health care network “could have financed the opposition to the initiative from petty cash if they wanted to… but instead they chose to remain on the sidelines.”