Gardner seeks assisted suicide law

OLYMPIA – Former Gov. Booth Gardner returned to the Statehouse on Wednesday, again facing a bank of news cameras for what he called his “last campaign” – a battle to let terminally ill people have a doctor’s help in ending their own lives.

Gardner, diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in the early 1990s, says ill people should be free to make such a choice. On Wednesday, he filed a “Death with Dignity” initiative. It would allow mentally competent adults with fatal illnesses and less than six months to live to be prescribed a lethal dose of drugs.

As things stand now, Gardner said, “the government takes over, the kids take over, the nurses and doctors take over. You lose your autonomy.”

Washington voters have faced – and rejected – the issue before. In 1991, they rejected by 54 percent a similar measure, Initiative 119.

“I don’t see a clamoring for this,” said Chris Carlson, a Spokane public-affairs consultant who also has Parkinson’s as well as a rare form of cancer.

“I believe assisted suicide is just flat wrong – a selfish act that breaks faith with family and society,” said Carlson, who was 14 when his father killed himself.

Defending life and the weak is a fundamental part of the social contract, he argues, and assisted suicide programs threaten to devalue that.

Some activists for people with disabilities agree.

“It has the potential to change the culture … and who’s worthy of life and who isn’t,” said Marshall Mitchell, who is quadriplegic and the coordinator of disability studies at Washington State University in Pullman.

“I don’t think that our culture is at the point that a person can make a free, unfettered choice about that,” Mitchell said, citing the pressures of health care costs and family’s dwindling savings. “Shoot, they get guilted into thinking, ‘I’m a burden, I’ve got to go.’ “

“The choice of assisted suicide will become some phony form of freedom,” predicted Duane French, who is also quadriplegic and a spokesman for the Coalition Against Assisted Suicide.

Oregon example

Gardner and other proponents point to nearby Oregon, which in 1994 approved a similar suicide measure, 51 percent to 49 percent. It’s the only such law in the nation.

The law survived a three-year court fight and voter referendum and took effect in 1998. It has also survived a years-long attempt, launched in 2001, by the federal government to ban the prescription of barbiturates for suicide.

“The Oregon measure has been in existence for 10 years,” said Jan Polek, a former legislative candidate who lives in Spokane. “One of the fears at the beginning was that it would be a slippery slope and that all sorts of people would be dying who didn’t want to die.”

That hasn’t happened, she said. Statistics compiled by the state of Oregon show that over the past five years, about 65 people a year have requested the lethal drugs and that about 40 use them to die.

“I think life with dignity has got to include death with dignity,” said Polek, who’s had a heart attack and open heart surgery. “You have to know that when the end comes, it’s still going to be your choice.”

Two years ago, she said, a close friend was dying and in great pain. She begged Polek to try to find drugs to end her life.

“And I couldn’t do anything. It was a horrible feeling to feel so helpless,” she said. Her friend died within a week.

If Oregon’s experience is typical, Mitchell calculates, a similar law in Washington would result in about 60 reported assisted suicides a year.

Campaign ahead

To get Gardner’s still-unnumbered measure on the November ballot, proponents must gather about 225,000 valid signatures. That means gathering about 310,000, proponents say, as some signatures are duplicates, illegible or false.

The Death with Dignity campaign will start with volunteer signature-gatherers – 1,000 are signed up, the group says – and then use paid signature-gatherers if necessary.

It’s likely to be a contentious campaign. Even the terminology is already in dispute. Backers say it’s wrong to call the proposal “assisted suicide,” noting that the term appears nowhere in Oregon’s law.

More importantly, “suicide is the act of an otherwise healthy person,” said social worker and hospice volunteer Arline Hinckley, a leader of the campaign. The Death with Dignity proposal gives an option to people who would want to live if they weren’t fatally ill, she said.

Opponents disagree. A patient choosing to take a lethal dose of a drug, Carlson said, “clearly is a suicide. I don’t see how you can call it anything but.”

Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary defines suicide as “taking one’s own life voluntarily and intentionally.”

The disagreement extends even to Gardner’s immediate family. The former governor has agreed to be the figurehead and a prime debater for the measure, even though he acknowledges that since Parkinson’s disease isn’t considered terminal, it wouldn’t affect him.

But Gardner’s own son, Doug Gardner, vehemently opposes the plan.

“He knows where I come from,” Doug Gardner said Wednesday, watching his father’s press conference in the secretary of state’s office.

The son said the father wrestles with depression over his advancing disease. He said that the two will continue to privately talk about the issue and that he’ll continue to hope for the best for his dad.

Nor will the measure have the support of the current governor, Chris Gregoire. Asked where she stands on the issue, she said that she loves her longtime friend and that her heart goes out to his struggle.

“I pray every day that we’ll find a cure,” Gregoire said. “But I find it on a personal level very, very difficult to support assisted suicide.”

But the governor said she won’t actively oppose the measure. “It is not my place to impose my morality on others,” Gregoire said later in a statement.

And even though the measure wouldn’t directly affect him, Gardner seemed to relish the thought of a final political horse race. Proponents of the measure “were looking for a rider. I ride well. Need I say more?” he said.

As for voters’ rejection of a similar bill 16 years ago, Gardner was asked what’s changed, if anything.

“Jack Kevorkian’s history,” he said, citing the Michigan doctor who allegedly helped more than 130 people die in the 1990s, ultimately going to prison for second-degree homicide. “Jack Kevorkian was running wild in 1991. … He’s not out there anymore.”

An ailing Kevorkian was released from prison in June after serving eight years of a 10- to 25-year sentence.

Among those who were with Gardner when he filed the measure: Portland resident Julie McMurchie, whose mother was diagnosed with cancer shortly after Oregon’s measure took effect. After 12 months of surgery and other interventions, her mother’s tumors came back, leaving the woman with severe pain and loss of bodily functions and unable to live the life she wanted, McMurchie said.

In January 2001, her mother lay in her apartment, surrounded by family members. They read poetry, listened to music and said goodbye.

“And when she was ready, she kissed us and asked us to read her the 23rd Psalm,” said McMurchie, struggling with the words. Then her mother consumed a drug and water.

“In five minutes she was unconscious, and in 15 minutes, she was dead,” McMurchie said. “Having this choice at the end of her life gave my mom great comfort. She was able to die on her own terms, surrounded by family and loved ones, clear and certain in her decision … one she made with the same grace and dignity with which she lived her life.”