Lawmakers will again push to approve ‘aid-in-dying’ bill
Connecticut lawmakers will once again introduce a bill allowing physicians to prescribe a lethal dose of medication to terminally ill patients, according to Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, who co-chairs the legislature’s public health committee.
“It is one of the priority bills of the public health committee,” said Steinberg, D-Westport, who added that the new legislation would be similar in scope to a bill proposed two years ago. “A couple tweaks here and there, nothing of real consequence, reflecting some of the learning we’ve had from experience of other states,” he said.
Physician-assisted death, sometimes called “aid-in-dying” or “death with dignity,” is legal in nine states — including Maine, New Jersey and Vermont — and the District of Columbia.
Previous attempts at legislation allowed for competent, terminally ill patients to request and self-administer life-ending medication.
Under the prior bill, before receiving a lethal prescription, a patient would be required to submit two written requests to an attending physician at least 15 days apart, with two other people witnessing each request. A consulting physician would then be required to examine the patient, confirm the initial physician’s diagnosis and confirm that the patient is competent and acting voluntarily.
If either doctor determines a patient is suffering from a condition that impairs judgment, they must refer the patient to counseling. Patients could rescind an aid-in-dying request at any time and for any reason. Fraudulent acts connected to the death of a patient would be punishable as murder.
The Connecticut General Assembly has considered similar bills five times since 2013, none of which was voted out of committee.
The 2019 bill drew hundreds of public comments from individuals and advocate groups.
Cathy Ludlum, leader of Second Thoughts Connecticut and a vocal opponent of aid-in-dying, said many people who may support it are unaware of “all the difficulties that arise with implementation.”
“No amount of safeguards can counter the social stigma of needing help with intimate care, of having to rely on others for support, of seeing your caregivers are tired, and wondering whether the world would be better off without you,” Ludlum said. “One has to wonder why you’re pushing it through during COVID-19 when constituents have less access to legislators and public hearings.”
Massachusetts-based cardiologist Thomas E. Sullivan said many patients in Oregon and elsewhere list fear of being a burden on caregivers as a top reason for requesting legal drugs. Other common reasons include loss of control, loneliness, dementia, subclinical depression and loss of purpose for living.
“None of these situations are easy to manage, but that is the domain of physiatrists and other disability care specialists and when appropriate, the role of hospice, palliative and compassionate experts who routinely perform these functions in a most humane manner,” Sullivan said.
Steinberg pushed back against suggestions by Ludlum and others that the new legislation would allow patients seeking lethal prescriptions to be coerced by caregivers or relatives.
“I don’t think the disability community has done a particularly good job of either reading the actual language of the bill nor having evaluated the actual experience of states that have passed such legislation, where I’ve yet to see any real significant pattern of abuse, of coercion,” Steinberg said.
“It hurts me because I’ve been allied with this community for a good number of years, have been directly involved with the Long Term Care Advisory Council, and they continue to assert in the absence of evidence, from what I can see, that there’s a problem here,” he said.
“We’re talking about a very small population of terminally ill patients, not the disabled community. We go out of our way in the language to do everything we can to assure that no family member or friend is coercing the person involved. So it really disappoints me that they continue to, in my mind, blindly oppose this legislation.”
Lisa Blumberg, a Hartford-area attorney, said the proposed legislation is not a “patients’ rights bill” but rather one that would “give doctors immunity for prescribing lethal drugs to certain patients who ask for them, if minimal criteria are met.
“The supposed safeguards only apply to the prescribing of drugs rather than the use of the drugs. We don’t know if a patient is competent when he takes them. We don’t know if he is having bad day. We don’t know anything. We cannot afford to just have faith.”