Viewpoint: Medical aid in dying is your choice, not politicians’

Dick Barrett

Montanans are on the cusp of losing – at the hands of our own legislature – an important civil right our citizens have enjoyed for many years, one that involves the most critical personal choices many of us will ever have to make about our own lives.

In its 2009 decision in the Baxter case, the Montana Supreme Court ruled that doctors can legally provide medical aid in dying to their suffering, terminally ill patients who request it. As a result, in the last 15-plus years physicians have prescribed medications that have helped many Montanans on the edge of death – your family members, friends and neighbors included – to die peacefully, and avoid the protracted pain, suffering, loss of control and indignity which can mark the final days of a terminal illness. They have provided that aid with profound care, consideration and humanity.

But Senate Bill 136, currently before the Montana House of Representatives, would criminalize aid in dying, and treat doctors who provide it at their patients’ request as murderers. This bill is an intolerable and unjustifiable government intrusion into the private lives of Montanans and a grave mistake that will only cause more unnecessary suffering. To see why, it’s important to understand what aid in dying is, and what it’s not.

Medical aid in dying is not “suicide.” The tragedy of suicide is that it ends a life that otherwise could go on and flourish. Aid in dying, on the other hand, is sought by terminally ill patients who want to live but are about to die anyway, and are confronted by agonizing, unrelieved suffering in their final days that leaves them yearning for a quiet and peaceful death rather than the wretched alternative. It’s therefore akin to the common decision of terminally ill patients – likewise already legal - to refuse medical treatment that accomplishes nothing but only prolongs their suffering.

Medical aid in dying is not a vehicle for abuse. Supporters of SB 136 claim it will be forced on the vulnerable, older and disabled people, or patients who are suffering from dementia or depression or have been falsely diagnosed. But they have never produced evidence of any kind that these abuses have occurred in Montana. And that’s because it’s never happened.

Medical aid in dying is never forced on anyone. It can only be provided at the request of the dying person, and it takes the form of oral medications that patients must ingest themselves. Even with the medication in hand, many people will not choose to take it as their lives come to an end, but it provides a strong sense of control for those who want the right to make these kinds of decisions for themselves.

Medical aid in dying does not put us on a “slippery slope” to euthanasia, which involves someone else making the decision to hasten a patient’s death and then carrying out that decision. There’s been absolutely no expansion of the scope of aid in dying in Montana for the past 15 years, and there is no movement in that direction now. If in fact there’s any “slippery slope” we should worry about, it’s the one SB 136 itself would put us on toward greater government interference with our private lives and medical decisions.

By attempting to make criminals out of our doctors and deny Montanans their right to make personal end-of-life decisions for themselves, SB 136 seeks to remedy a problem that simply doesn’t exist, and in the process makes it impossible for doctors to alleviate the suffering of a small but significant number of terminally ill patients. Please contact your representatives in the Montana House and ask them to oppose this bad bill.

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.

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