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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Opinion

Act reflects low value placed on disabled and sick, foes say

The Spokesman-Review

Former Washington Gov. Booth Gardner, who has Parkinson’s disease, is the sponsor of Initiative 1000, the so-called Washington Death with Dignity Act. If enough signatures are gathered by July, voters will decide the issue in the fall.

The same day Gardner filed the initiative, the Coalition Against Assisted Suicide came out against it. The group is now challenging the initiative’s proposed ballot language in court, in part because the word “suicide” is not included. The Spokesman-Review’s editorial board recently sat down with three members of the coalition. Chris Carlson, a Spokane public affairs consultant, has Parkinson’s and is battling cancer. Marshall Mitchell and Lori Rowlett are husband and wife, university educators and disability rights experts. Both have used wheelchairs for decades.

Q: What is your No. 1 objection?

Carlson: To me, it fundamentally breaks the first rule of the social compact: People come together to protect life. People in all cultures, of all religions, come together to protect the weak from the predatory strong, protect those who may not have some higher defined value to society. And suicide – and make no mistake about it, this is physician-assisted suicide – breaks faith with family, society and is just flat wrong.

Mitchell: Initiatives like this change the way we think about death and the value of life. There are good studies about the change of culture in the Netherlands. They’ve only had the laws a few years, but they’ve had the mentality since the ‘70s. People with disabilities in the Netherlands, instead of carrying a card that says, “Do not resuscitate,” carry a card that says, basically, “Don’t kill me.”

More people (are) being euthanized without their consent or knowledge in nursing homes. It didn’t start out that way. It started out as a merciful thing, but then the culture changed to think it’s a win-win: It puts them out of their misery, and it keeps us from having to use so many resources on them.

Rowlett: I too am worried about the shift in the culture to put pressure on people like us not to exist. There is already sometimes a public attitude that we take up resources that could be better spent on someone “superior” in the able-bodied population.

Q: But the initiative (applies) only to people guaranteed to be dead within six months.

Carlson: I could have qualified under that. My initial (cancer) diagnosis was probably six months. I’m 18 months past the six-month point. This initiative encourages a shortening of life. We should err on the side of encouraging life to its natural outcome. We shouldn’t have the state in the business of encouraging physician-assisted suicide. By definition, in many books, suicide is considered an irrational act, often taken as a sign of insanity. This proposal treats it like a sane and rational act. That goes against human instinct. We want to live.

Mitchell: When somebody gets a diagnosis that they’ve got six months to live, sure they’ll get depressed. Only about 2 percent are being sent for psychological evaluations (in Oregon) and some of them have a history of clinical depression, and they are still not sending them for psychological investigations.

Q: What would you say to Booth Gardner if he were here?

Rowlett: I would make the point to him that feeling depressed is one of the natural stages of grief when you receive a serious diagnosis, whether it be Parkinson’s or cancer or a spinal cord injury. People think they want to die. But if you ask them after they’ve lived with the condition, they often don’t feel that way anymore. It would be more fruitful to treat the depression. If someone is in pain, wouldn’t it be better to treat the pain with decent palliative care rather than put them in the position where the choice is death with dignity or life without dignity? Whatever happened to life with dignity?

Carlson: I know Booth Gardner. I sat with him at a ballgame five years ago and we talked about Parkinson’s. I have feelings of both compassion and pity for Booth. He’s decided this is his last campaign. I’m sorry to see he’s using a lot of good will and credibility he built up in two terms as governor to lend himself to something that, in my view, is flat wrong.

Q: For all of us, life is going to end sooner or later. Isn’t this just a question of when we stop living?

Mitchell: If you want to commit suicide, people do it all the time. You don’t have to have some law that will potentially cause harm in the future to make that happen. The choice is already there.

Carlson: I come back to the practical question of what is the problem here they’re trying to fix? I think they represent a minority. When you run polls on it, initially people think, “Yeah!” The reason it gets defeated is that opposition groups succeed in educating people to the fact it is suicide. Once you poll on that, it flip-flops. This has come before 25 states and legislatures, and Oregon is the only one that has approved it. When you educate the public, they don’t see a need for it.

Q: What is your attitude toward the proponents of this? How do you assess their motives?

Rowlett: People react with fear when they think about pain and when they think about disability. We see it in people all the time. People express it in their papers and in the classroom. They think if they had to “live like that” they’d rather be dead.

Q: There are people in Oregon who have gone through the whole process. They aren’t guessing what it’s like. And their family members say this is the best for their family.

Carlson: None of us controls how we come into this world. Why people think we have some God-given right to control how we go out of the world to me is illogical. Why do they need the state to get into this business? Normally, most people have a mistrust of government. But they are saying, “Let’s get the government into this highly personal area.”

Q: Anything else you want to say?

Rowlett: This has a lot to do with whom society deems is worthwhile. We don’t admit it, but we make a lot of value judgments about whose life is worthwhile and whose isn’t.

Mitchell: There’s a powerful video about a guy who contracted polio when he was 6. He spent 23 out of 24 hours in an iron lung. He was a published author and poet.

Most people would have looked at his life from the outside and said, “Of course, he would probably love to be put out of his misery.” He wrote articles against physician-assisted suicide.