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Old 12-12-2007, 01:55 AM #1
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Default WASHINGTON STATE: Booth Gardner,a former Washington state governor & assisted suicide

Helium in an 'exit bag' new choice for suicide

Booth Gardner, a former Washington state governor and a Parkinson's sufferer, leads an initiative to legalize assisted suicide in his state

Doug Ward, Vancouver Sun
Published: Saturday, December 08, 2007
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/n...266405295d&p=3

The right-to-die debate, which divided Canadians in the early '90s, is expected to split voters next year in Washington state where a popular former governor is spearheading a ballot initiative that would legalize assisted suicide.

Booth Gardner, a former two-term governor who has suffered the effects of Parkinson's disease for more than 14 years, wants Washington to adopt the 10-year-old Oregon law which allows physicians to provide dying patients a lethal dose of narcotics.

The 71-year-old veteran politician and heir to the Weyerhaeuser timber fortune has told reporters that "this will be my last campaign."

Suicide is something that preoccupies Gardner. He's declared his intent to end his own life when he can no longer tolerate what Parkinson's is doing to his body and mind.

A political action committee called It's My Decision is preparing to collect the 224,000 signatures required to get the assisted-suicide measure on the ballot in the November 2008 elections.

Gardner was the Democratic governor in 1991 when a similar ballot initiative was defeated narrowly 54 to 46 per cent. The death-with-dignity measure was at the time the most expensive in the state's history.

But Gardner wasn't a participant in that debate and could barely recall it in recent media interviews. Back then death was far from Gardner's mind. He was a robust governor who could run marathons and climb mountains.

A few years after the 1991 ballot fight, Gardner developed Parkinson's. The progressive disease has regularly left him physically debilitated and depressed -- and thinking of his own final exit.

Supporters of the assisted-suicide measure are hoping that Gardner's profile will help them bridge the narrow gap that kept them from victory in 1991.

"Booth is a very well-liked former governor who is a strong spokesperson for this measure and brings a great deal of credibility to the campaign," said Christian Sinderman, a spokesman for the It's My Decision committee.

Gardner intends to speak strongly and often for the ballot initiative -- even though it would be of no use to him.

The proposed right-to-die law -- just like the law in Oregon -- would only involve terminally ill people. Parkinson's can mean a life of incurable suffering but it is not considered terminal. You don't die from Parkinson's.

Oregon was the first and only American state where physician-assisted dying is legal. The Oregon Death with Dignity Act was approved by voters in 1994 and 1997. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Oregon's law in 2006, blocking the Bush administration's attempt to punish physicians who help hasten the death of terminally ill patients.

Under the Oregon measure, two physicians must declare that the patient has no more than six months to live and does not suffer from any mental disorder. The patient then makes a written request for a prescription from his physician for life-ending medication.

If the request is authorized, the patient must wait at least 15 days and make a second oral request before the prescription is written. Participation by physicians is voluntary and protected from liability.

Since the Oregon law took effect in 1997, until the end of 2006, 292 people have asked their physicians to provide them a lethal dose of drugs, an average of just over 30 a year.

A University of Utah-led study on the Oregon experience found that people who received a doctor's help in dying averaged 70 years old and 80 per cent were cancer patients.

The Washington measure is expected to be vigorously opposed the Catholic Church, evangelical churches and some disability groups.

"We are opposed to assisted suicide and any legalization of the ending of life by other than natural causes," said Greg Magnoni, spokesman for the Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle. "We believe in the protection of human life from conception to natural death."

Also opposing Gardner's campaign is Duane French, who heads the Washington chapter of Not Dead Yet, a national advocacy group for the disabled.

"We think it would put people with disabilities at risk," French said. "The leading proponent of the measure is Booth Gardner and he doesn't have a terminal illness, he has a disability."

Physician-assisted suicide refers to the doctor providing the means for death, typically medication. The lethal drugs are administered by the patient, not the doctor.

Euthanasia generally means that the physician -- or someone else -- ends a dying or incurable ill person's life through lethal injection or by another means.

Assisted suicide is illegal in every American state, except Oregon, and in Canada. Three European countries have legalized the controversial practice -- the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland.

The Netherlands legalized physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia in 2002 for both the terminally ill and also for those (like Gardner) who suffer from incurable diseases.

The right-to-die debate in Canada has been dormant since 1993 when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in a 5-4 vote that Sue Rodriguez did not have a constitutional right to assisted suicide.

Rodriguez, a Victoria woman who suffered from the terminal Lou Gehrig's disease, gave the issue unprecedented exposure when she asked members of Parliament: "If I cannot give consent to my own death, whose body is this? Who owns my life?"

She committed suicide in 1994 with the help of an anonymous physician. Former NDP MP Svend Robinson, a champion of Rodriguez's cause, was also present.

As Canadians followed Rodriguez's tragic struggle to end her life, they were also torn by the case of Robert Latimer, the Saskatchewan farmer who killed his severely disabled daughter, 12-year-old Tracy, in 1993.

Latimer was convicted of second-degree murder in 1994 and sentenced to life. His story made headlines this week when he was denied day parole by the National Parole Board.

Latimer's mercy killing is a classic case of euthanasia, which is different from the assisted suicide sought by Rodriguez and now former governor Gardner in Washington.

While Latimer's case clearly divided the country, recent polls indicate about 75 per cent of Canadians support assisted suicide.

Federal politicians have been loath to raise the issue, although former justice minister Irwin Cotler, a Liberal, said in 2005 that Canadians should revisit the issue. But a plan to look at what is being done in other jurisdictions died when his party lost the 2006 federal election.

Bloc Quebecois MP Francine Lalonde has a private members' bill in Parliament, which would allow assisted suicide for a person with a terminal illness or someone experiencing severe physical or mental pain, yet who is mentally lucid when the request for death is made.

But right-to-die activists expect the bill will suffer the fate of most other private members' bills and die on the order paper.

In Canada, assisted suicide remains a federal matter and can only be changed by Parliament or the Supreme Court -- not by some provincial ballot initiative similar to the one expected in Washington.

Kwantlen criminologist Russel Ogden expects the thorny issue will return to the public spotlight as the baby boom generation ages. "We are now in a state where our bodies are outliving our minds. The prospect of dementia is frightening for many elderly people," Ogden said.

"So the desire to avoid that will probably be in the minds of a lot of people."

And if politicians and the courts decline to legalize assisted suicide, Ogden said, "many people seeking an end to their suffering will take the matter into their own hands or engage the services of right-to-die activists."

dward@png.canwest.com
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Old 12-12-2007, 05:43 AM #2
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Default the story in the NYTimes

The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, Dec 2, carried the following story on Booth and his campaign for death with dignity. I thought the article was really good - a balanced, thoughtful essay written by a man whose father has PD.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/ma...ewanted=1&_r=1

I know Booth; he is exactly as described in this story - absolutely still full of life although suffering increasingly with PD symptoms. The holistic PD clinic near Seattle that I go to is named for him. Just because he wants control over how he dies doesn't mean that he lives without the best care available now.

After reading this story, I feel less supportive of the legalization of assisted suicide. But I still think taking my own life at the end of a long battle with PD is an option - legal or not.
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Old 12-12-2007, 06:35 AM #3
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I can certainly understand where someone would get to this point and want to die. I watched my mother and my aunt anxiously await death in the hospital for the final times of their life. When you are at the end of the road, with only death to come, you want it to come.

But I don't believe we are in a position to make the decision ourselves. I was raised in the church, where of course most do not support it; but that is not the entire reason. I think we have a purpose for others, things to teach them, that there are needs being met and learned from us that we do not plan or know about.

And then there are less spiritual and more human reasons, like the people who will actually kill others "for their own good."

This issue is another that may be split along religious lines; depends on what you believe. Ending your own life, is still taking a life. It's a tough decision.

Paula
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Old 12-12-2007, 11:43 AM #4
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Paula -

The reason I thought this article was so good is that it takes as a given that certain religions and religious groups would oppose it. Instead, the author talks to others in positions of influence who oppose it for more "liberal" reasons. For instance, the danger of people with disabilities being forced to end their lives early; not necessarily by malevolent doctors or family members, but just because the law would make it easier. The issues raised are really complicated; the article does a good job sorting things out in a thoughtful fashion.
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Old 12-12-2007, 12:18 PM #5
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Yes Carey, and it's pretty bold for an ex-governor. Maybe it will send a message about just how bad this disease gets. And of course it's just one of many.

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Old 12-12-2007, 12:46 PM #6
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Default quote from article

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."
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Old 12-12-2007, 06:46 PM #7
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My take on ending your life because of pain, is it is an act of anger and hurts those who are left behind. They will wonder all their lives if they should have been their for you.

We don't live in a vacumn. We are all in this togeather and what affects one affects all. None of us are getting out alive.

Vicky
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Old 12-13-2007, 03:27 AM #8
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Default I was proudest of my father when ...

I saw him fighting for each breath before he died. He was given days but fought for weeks, battling for life.

Somehow assisted suicide doesn't feel like the answer for me and I'm damn sure it wasn't on my Dad's agenda.

Neil.
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