I think the following passage from the story sums up the conflicts and complexities, and also directly addresses the "cruelty" of PD:

"The evenly divided numbers in Oregon may be an indication, she suggests, that women are being pushed toward deaths they wouldn’t otherwise embrace.

That type of push — gentle, perhaps, but impelling — is what frightens State Senator Margarita Prentice for minorities and, too, for all of us. Mexican-American, Prentice has been a liberal state legislator in Washington for almost 20 years, going back to Gardner’s time as governor, and she was a nurse for more than three decades before that; she speaks with affection about Gardner and with pity about his illness. “I’ve always thought Parkinson’s was the worst thing to have,” she told me, as we sat in a booth in a coffee shop in the town of Renton. “Alzheimer’s is better — you don’t know what’s happening. Parkinson’s you know. It’s a cruel disease. I don’t know why the Lord does these things to us. But I’m damned scared of this law he’s trying to pass. I’m scared of the loosening.”

She wore a necklace with the Ten Commandments inscribed into 10 tiny gold pages, but her opposition to Gardner’s campaign didn’t seem to rely on religion. She spoke about the rising Latino population in the state and the country, about the resentments and fears this engendered, and about the effect this might have, no matter how unconscious, on physicians’ approaches to caring for Latino patients, on their regard for Latino lives."