Mourning the ‘Death with Dignity’ bill

Mourning the ‘Death with Dignity’ bill

Hawaii’s “Death with Dignity” bill itself has died, quietly strangled by a cowardly House of Representatives. The bill would have allowed a mentally competent adult patient with a terminal illness with less than six months to live to voluntarily request and receive self-administered prescription medication to end their life. The normally admirable chair of the House Health Committee, Della Au Bellati, claimed she was tabling the bill because “We’re concerned about the safeguards, the record keeping, the physician training to be able to do this prescribing for aid in dying.”

This is baloney. The bill is modeled on the successful Oregon law, which has an unblemished 20-year record in which none of these concerns has surfaced. Other states, notably California and Washington, have shorter but comparable records. Representatives could have voted to bring the issue to the House floor. But they quietly looked the other way, despite broad support from community organizations, four previous governors, their own speaker and polling showing 80 percent approval. Their real fear was the bus loads of blue-T-shirted foot soldiers who crowded into House chambers. These people represent the same forces who want to withdraw a woman’s right to choose abortion, a couple’s right to practice birth control, LGBT rights and now the hope of the dying to choose a compassionate end to an inevitably fatal illness.

Two points about the methodology of this assertive minority: They seek to compel others to conform to the more medieval aspects of their beliefs. They are totally free to choose unwanted births and agonizing death, but why must they force that on the rest of us? For people who claim the moral high ground, their mendacity is amazing, with resort to such terms as “suicide” and “euthanasia” meant to frighten those who simply haven’t read the bill.

We love and support the hospice organizations in Hawaii, but it’s misleading to claim, as Aid in Dying opponents have, that palliative care has totally eliminated end-of-life suffering. I’d like to demand that each House member shake hands and look straight in the eye of John Radcliffe, a cancer patient who has courageously gone public with his imminent prospect of a painful death. He represents hundreds of local families who, contemplating the same fate, are forced to consider moving to the West Coast to avail themselves of this civilized option. I wish to thank Sen. Lorraine Inouye for supporting the bill. Rep. Cindy Evans, who quietly helped to kill the bill, should know that I’ll be working hard in support of David Tarnas to replace her in the 2018 elections.

David Polhemus

Waimea