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Southwest Life Health And the West is History Community Travel

Pursuing dignity in death

Hundreds listen to advocate speak at Fort Lewis College

Since 1776, American public opinion has undergone fundamental transformations on a number of topics. For instance, after centuries of spirited debate, most Americans now agree slavery is bad, women should vote and alcohol ought to be legal.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, all humans die. Historians likewise insist that Americans have been dying since the country’s inception – as have all humans, since the dawn of humanity.

Yet, in 2015, death – and whether it is some Americans’ right and not just a medical inevitability – remains one of the great, unsettled subjects in modern American political discourse.

Last week, Colorado lawmakers introduced an Oregon-style “death with dignity” bill that would make it legal for terminally ill Coloradans with less than six months to live to take a life-ending dose of medication prescribed by a doctor.

The proposed legislation immediately provoked a furor, with opponents casting it as a way to “bump grandma,” according to Roland Halpern, who works in Denver for the national organization Compassion & Choices.

On Thursday, hundreds of Durango residents – some trailed by oxygen tanks – packed Fort Lewis College’s Noble Hall to hear Halpern make a spirited, philosophically rigorous, often funny, case for passing the bill.

Halpern emphasized the people who have become post-mortem poster children for “death with dignity” legislation: Colorado’s Charles Selsberg, who begged for the legal power to end his life before dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS, at 77; and Brittany Maynard, 29, who ended her life in Oregon last year, where death with dignity legislation has been recognized as legal since 1997. Maynard was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.

Halpern said America’s historic ambivalence about death was at last shifting; according to 30 years worth of Gallup polling on euthanasia, popular support for death with dignity legislation is at a high tide.

In 2014, 69 percent of Americans said “Yes” when Gallup asked: “When a person has a disease that cannot be cured, do you think doctors should be allowed by law to end the patient’s life by some painless means if the patient and his or her family request it?”

“We don’t like the word ‘euthanasia,’” Halpern said. “But I like this poll because it’s asked the same question, with the same wording, for decades. Any other issue with majority support would be law by now.”

The chance of passing such legislation has been consistently smited, he said, by a mighty triumvirate: “organized religion, right-to-lifers and some, but not all, disability groups.”

Halpern said though these factions have been united in opposing death with dignity legislation, they’ve advanced very different arguments, and some factions’ protests are more deserving than others.

First, he took on organized religion, addressing the stance of the Catholic Church, which holds that helping someone who is terminally ill and in pain end his or her life is killing, and the Bible says killing is a sin no matter the circumstance.

Halpern cited several Bible passages that appear to take a rather more lax position on the virtue of killing, including Exodus 31:15, which says anyone who works on the Sabbath should be put to death.

“I’m not trying to make fun of religion,” he said. “But death for working on the Sabbath – that probably takes care of everyone at Walmart.”

He said most religious people support death with dignity legislation, quoting Archbishop Desmond Tutu (“I revere the sanctity of life – but not at any cost.”) and theologian Hans Kung (“No person is obligated to suffer the unbearable as something sent from God.”).

Halpern was less patient with the right-to-life movement, saying its opposition to death with dignity legislation “is mostly scare tactics rather than substance. They just use terror tactics.”

He characterized their objections as attempting to stoke fear by making claims such as, “If this gets legalized, you’ll be euthanized, so we can get your organs’” – causing the audience to laugh.

Halpern said the disabled community’s quarrels with death with dignity legislation are – intellectually and emotionally – much worthier, and he took a lot more time to parse them.

“Their concern is that HMOs would force them to use medications to end their life because it’s cheaper to kill them than to care for them,” he said.

He said this concern isn’t wholly unfounded, as people who are disabled often face unfair treatment.

“They’re also worried that people with disabilities would use the law to avoid being a burden on their family,” he said. “We have to be sensitive to this.”

But, he said, the death with dignity bill has many safeguards that should assuage the disabled.

“There’s a difference between being terminally ill and being disabled,” he said, saying the bill only applies to people who are terminally ill and have fewer than six months to live.

“Only the patient can make the request: No one can make it on their behalf,” he said. “Also, the medication has to be self-administered. No one can assist the person, and anyone who does can be guilty of a felony.”

Halpern said that some people, suffering from a terrible terminal illness and told they have few months to live, choose to fight on, undergoing treatment after treatment – however painful – in the hopes of a miracle.

“And if you want to get all that treatment, go for it!” Halpern said. “It’s about having the choice.”

cmcallister@durangoherald.com



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