By Diane Carman
DenverPost.com
August 19, 2012
The question before the court in New Mexico is absurdly simple and yet impossibly complex. What is the meaning of “assisting suicide”?
If a terminally ill patient refuses a ventilator or a feeding tube and the physician yields to that decision, is that assisting suicide? If the patient is in excruciating pain and requests total sedation and no nutrition or fluids, can the doctor be held accountable for his death? What if the patient seeks a prescription from her physician so that when the pain of dying is overwhelming she can seek the ultimate relief on her own?
Two oncologists from the University of New Mexico Health Science Center and a patient with advanced cancer are the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed in New Mexico District Court designed to clarify the legal definition of assisting suicide. That decision, likely to come in the next year, could send reverberations through the medical establishment in the Rocky Mountain West and across the country.
Morris vs. New Mexico contends that the statute outlawing “assisting suicide” never was intended to apply to physicians treating patients in the late stages of terminal illnesses. The plaintiffs believe that “patients who are dying and finding themselves trapped in an unbearable dying process should be able to choose aid in the dying process,” said Kathryn Tucker, director of legal affairs for Compassion & Choices, a nonprofit organization that works to expand choices in end-of-life care. She is one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the case.
Compassion & Choices advocates for physicians to be allowed to prescribe medication to mentally competent terminal patients who can administer the drugs to themselves “to bring about a peaceful death,” Tucker said.
The organization contends that it’s fundamentally different than the commonly held idea of suicide, which presumes that without the suicidal acts, the person would be able to live. Opponents say it is exactly the same, an affront to human dignity, false compassion and highly susceptible to abuse.
If anyone had asked 48-year-old Aja Riggs a year ago for her opinion on assisting suicide, chances are she would have supported it. “I would have said, ‘Sure, I think people have the right to choose at the end of their lives if they’d like a physician’s aid in dying.’ ” She’d never had a particularly keen interest in the issue, though.
That changed 11 months ago.
Now, the self-employed professional organizer from Santa Fe said, “It’s really important to me.”
Riggs was diagnosed with uterine cancer last August. Surgery in October revealed that her condition was at stage 3c, far more advanced than doctors had expected.
After she recovered from the surgery, she underwent chemotherapy, during which another tumor developed. Then she had radiation treatments and now is receiving chemotherapy again.
“When I was diagnosed, I decided I wanted the most aggressive treatment that’s going to be effective. I thought, if I can get another 20 years in this life or so, wouldn’t that be great,” she said.
But Riggs is realistic.
“If my disease progresses, more difficult individualized decisions will be coming up,” she said. “If this disease does look like it will end my life, I can’t say for sure how I will make those decisions. … I can’t tell you for sure that I would get that prescription, fill it and use it. But I absolutely want to have that choice.”
Colorado’s assisted suicide law states that it is considered manslaughter if a “person intentionally causes or aids another person to commit suicide.”
While the specific statutes across the country are not identical, states generally protect the rights of terminally ill patients to give advance directives and make decisions on their care at the end of life. Tucker, who was among the lead attorneys litigating Baxter vs. Montana, maintains that the long-standing statutes outlawing assisting suicide were never intended to apply to physicians providing end-of-life care for terminally ill patients.
These statutes were “enacted at a time when medicine didn’t prolong the dying process as it does today,” said Tucker. “It’s pretty clear that that was not on the minds of legislators who introduced or voted on these measures.”
Instead, the laws were aimed at people who might provide a distraught teenager with the means to end his life after a bad breakup, or the friend who helps someone make a noose after he lost his job, she said. “There is an appropriate role for these statutes, but I don’t think they have anything to do with aid in dying.”
Tucker and Schwartz said that momentum for physician-assisted suicide is strong across the West. Legislation that legalized it in Oregon and Washington, along with the Montana court decision, have generated growing support for the practice, and both advocates and opponents are watching the New Mexico case closely.
The most outspoken opponents to physician-assisted suicide have been leaders in the disability rights community. Diane Coleman, president and CEO of the nationwide disability rights organization Not Dead Yet, said there already are sufficient means for terminally ill patients to end their lives without providing immunity from prosecution for physicians who prescribe lethal drugs.
“The risks to many outweigh the alleged benefit to the few,” she said. Those risks include people succumbing to coercion from heirs or other family members, or to pressure from health insurers who deny services needed to cope with limitations caused by their conditions.
“This is something the patient chooses and does for herself. It’s not the doctor doing it,” she said. “It’s not a choice between life and death. It’s a choice about what kind of death.”