House votes down physician-assisted suicide bill
A proposal to make physician-assisted suicide illegal in Montana won’t pass this legislative session, after lawmakers Wednesday failed to advance the bill with a 50-50 vote in the House.
The razor-thin decision came one day after the chamber’s preliminary 52-48 vote in favor of House Bill 536, which sought to reverse the Montana Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Baxter v. Montana. The ruling protects physicians who provide aid in dying treatment from homicide prosecution.
The House vote was one of the last taken before the Legislature’s Wednesday transmittal deadline, by which point non-spending bills must pass either the House or Senate to stay alive. Following final votes on 19 other bills, lawmakers adjourned for their transmittal break and will reconvene March 7.
Rep. Brad Tschida, R-Missoula, had sponsored the measure. It would have enacted a language in state law explicitly stating that consent is not a defense for physicians charged with homicide after providing lethal treatments to patients.
Speaking to House representatives during Tuesday’s floor debate, Tschida argued that the legality of physician-assisted suicide is inconsistent with state laws and programs seeking to address Montana’s highest-in-the-nation suicide rate.
“Montana is experiencing an epidemic of suicide, especially prevalent among our youth,” Tschida said. “...Our youth are needlessly sacrificing their lives due to many things. Chief among them is confusion.”
He noted that the Legislature has already considered nine bills aiming to prevent suicides this session, “yet in the next instant they hear others cry out for freedom in an effort to end their lives.”
The lengthy floor debate split largely along party lines. Rep. Theresa Manzella, R-Hamilton, argued in favor of the measure, emotionally recounting the experience of watching her 90-year-old mother die.
“Assisting her in the dying process was by far the hardest and most painful thing I have had to do, but it also deepened my faith in God and eternity more than anything I have ever experienced,” she said.
Manzella also argued that allowing physician-assisted suicide unfairly places medical professionals in the position of having to neglect their duty to heal people.
“The moment to introduce that as a possible goal for your doctors, you have diverted a profession in a way that will wreak psychological havoc on doctors and our society,” she said.
Also providing an emotional appeal to his colleagues, Rep. Shane Morigeau, D-Missoula, said he watched a close friend dying from an inoperable brain tumor when he was in college, prior to the 2009 court decision.
He said that those ready to end their lives as they mentally deteriorate from fatal illnesses are faced with either relocating to a state where assisted suicide is legal, or committing suicide themselves.
“People shouldn’t have to go through all that additional trauma,” Morigeau said. “If there’s ever a time when government needs to get out of the way, it is this. I think we all need to stop policing individual choice.”
Similar bills have failed to advance during previous legislative sessions.
After giving preliminary approval to the bill, the House will take a final vote Wednesday, during its last floor session before adjourning for the transmittal break.
Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.