EdT

Yesterday, with the signature of Governor David Ice on the Our Care, Our Choice Act, the Aloha State became the 8th US jurisdiction to authorize Medical Aid in Dying.

At the annual Democratic Party convention of the Orange County Democrats, a resolution calling for enactment of MAID in North Carolina introduced by DRNC Executive Director Edmund Tiryakian, who is also a precinct chairman, was unanimously approved.

DRNC is sponsoring an important conference on the future of MAID in NC. Our keynote speakers are Barbara Mancini, whose harrowing tale of being arrested in PA while trying to help her bedridden dying father shocked audiences when she was interviewed on 60 Minutes, and Atty Kathryn Tucker, the nation’s premier litigator of MAID cases.

A recent NPR radio summary of an angry protest in Belgium over a controversial euthanasia incident likely disturbed any number of unwitting US listeners. The broadcast explained that a Belgian doctor had just resigned in anger and disgust from the country’s euthanasia commission after a dementia patient who never specifically asked to die was euthanized at the family’s request.

On January 31, 2018 to the surprise and delight of many, an Alaska House Health Committee approved 5-2 a measure to enact MAID in Alaska, HB 54.

One of the more confounding reasons cited by opponents of MAID is the notion, that the timeline called for under the statutory enactments that two doctors believe the applicant is likely to pass within six months due to a terminal condition, is at best an unreliable, if not impossible guesstimate.

Opponents of MAID are quick to mischaracterize the exercise as Physician Assisted Suicide. It serves their narrative that a terminal patient seeking release from suffering, lack of autonomy, utter helplessness and futility in the face of the medically proclaimed inevitable should be viewed in the same prism as a vigorous young individual in excellent health who succumbs to a moment’s despair over a temporary setback.

Among the many hoary predictions of MAID opponents is the notion that enacting Death with Dignity legislation will usher in a culture of suicide. During the debate in the late 1990s in Oregon and Washington, one often read dire predictions that passage of the legislation would make those states suicide meccas and that soon the local medical communities would be swamped by folks availing themselves.

Our two Board members have recently been published arguing the logic and compassion underpinning Death with Dignity legislation, such as HB789. Dr William Hazzard had his Letter to the Editor of the Winston Salem Journal published in early June in which he discusses the case of his sister Ra, who used the law in Oregon because of its unavailability here in NC.

On June 9, 2016 California’s version of Death with Dignity legislation (a/k/a Medical Aid in Dying), the End of Life Option Act, went into effect, following a contorted enactment over the course of several years.

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Our own Lisa Roach made news recently as she finishes her third year of Law School at Wake Forest University. For more, read here