Protect personal right to aid in dying
A fundamental principle of Montana law is that people should have control over their own health care, including the ability to decide for themselves the kinds of medical treatment they want and do not want, who will provide it, and under what circumstances it should be given. Montanans understand that the government has no business inserting itself into the doctor-patient relationship and making these intensely personal decisions for us.
As one important example, when death is near and certain, the law recognizes that different people will have different ideas on how to best spend their final days, and the kinds of medical interventions they think worthwhile in seeking to minimize the suffering they experience as life ends.
Not everyone will die a tortured death, but some of us inevitably will, notwithstanding the best efforts of our doctors. Aid in dying, recognized by the Montana Supreme Court’s Baxter decision, is the right each of us has to control – to the extent humanly possible – the manner and timing of how we die. That includes the right of terminally ill but mentally competent patients to seek a prescription for medication to hasten death by a small increment, in order to minimize suffering they find unbearable. Where death is both inevitable and imminent, they are, in essence, asking their doctors to help them die in peace rather than continued torment. This decision on whether to pursue aid in dying, the law holds, should rightfully be left to the individuals whose lives and deaths are directly involved, rather than the government.
Along with many of our sister states, we’ve had this personal right to aid in dying for a dozen years now, and a significant number of our fellow citizens have been able to achieve quiet and peaceful deaths as a result. But Sen. Carl Glimm is currently asking our Legislature to outlaw aid in dying under any and all circumstances, intending to transform it from a private humane act initiated and completed by the patient, with the cooperation of a trusted physician, into a criminal offense subjecting the doctor to prosecution for deliberate homicide, life in prison or even the death penalty itself. The strategy is to deter physicians from fulfilling their sworn duty to help alleviate suffering under these extreme conditions, with the result that patients seeking relief are left with no personal control or option but to suffer on, to no purpose, to a bitter end.
Sen. Glimm is a member of the Legislature’s “Freedom Caucus,” which says it supports individual rights, limited government, personal responsibility and “medical freedom.” But how can those goals possibly be consistent with Glimm’s bill, which imposes the state’s will on the most private and wrenching medical decisions that most Montanans will ever have to make?
Some may object to aid in dying on religious grounds, feeling that medical science should not be used to shorten the period of human suffering, even minimally, on the ground that only God should determine the length of a person’s life. Those sharing this perspective are certainly entitled to their views. It should not be the state’s role, however, to impose religious beliefs on others who do not share them, and polls show that a strong majority of Montanans want aid in dying to remain as a legal option in our state.
If Sen. Glimm’s bill passes, Montana would become a place where an act that’s entirely legal in much of the country is subject to criminal prosecution with the threat of capital punishment. Please contact your state senators and representatives and ask that they oppose Senate Bill 210.
Dick Barrett is a retired University of Montana professor and former state legislator and senator. Mark Connell is a retired Missoula lawyer who argued the Baxter case before the Montana district court and Supreme Court.