Oregon pushes to expand right to die

Supporters want law to cover degenerative diseases that aren’t always fatal

LOS ANGELES — Shortly after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at age 56, Nora Harris moved to Oregon from California with her husband, thinking it would be a place where she could die on her own terms.

Shortly after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at age 58, Bruce Yelle migrated to Oregon from the Golden State for the same reason. This was the state, after all, that pioneered medically assisted suicide in America when its Death with Dignity Act took effect in 1997.

As it turned out, both Harris and Yelle were ineligible: People with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, multiple sclerosis and a host of other degenerative diseases are generally excluded from the Oregon law.

This is because some degenerative diseases aren’t fatal. People die with Parkinson’s, for example, not because of it. Other diseases, such as advanced Alzheimer’s, rob people of the cognition they need to legally request the suicide medications.

Harris — a onetime Virginia Woolf scholar who worked as a library branch manager — died in October at 64, unable to speak coherently, feed herself or recognize loved ones. Though she had filled out an advance health-care directive instructing caregivers not to feed her if she lost the ability to feed herself, she was spoon-fed until two days before her passing.

“Nora did not have a peaceful death,” said her husband, Bill Harris, who lobbied on behalf of a newly approved bill to update Oregon’s advance-directive law.

Yelle, also 64, is alive and active, trying to change laws in Oregon that would essentially open up more assisted suicide avenues for people with these diseases. He said that unless he could eventually obtain a doctor’s prescription for a lethal medication, “I’m going to have an ugly death.”

Their efforts are among several throughout North America that highlight a quiet but concerted push to bring the right-to-die debates to a new frontier: people with dementia, Alzheimer’s and other degenerative diseases.

Relatively modest drives are afoot in Washington state and California, where organizations have launched education campaigns on how people can fill out instructions for future caregivers to withhold food and drink, thereby carrying out an option that is legal to anybody: death by starvation and dehydration. (It is often referred to as the “voluntarily stopping eating and drinking” method.)

The boldest bid is taking place in Quebec. Prompted by a 2017 murder case involving the apparent “mercy killing” of a 60-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s by her husband — who smothered her with a pillow — the province’s government is studying the possibility of legalizing euthanasia for Alzheimer’s patients.

Somewhere between these points is Oregon, where several lawmakers are trying to push the right-to-die envelope.

Under the current law, eligible patients can obtain prescriptions for lethal barbiturates. Qualified patients must be diagnosed with a terminal illness, have a prognosis of six or fewer months to live, and self-ingest the drug. The vast majority — more than 70 percent, according to the Oregon Health Division — have cancer; most others have either heart disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Washington state, Vermont, California and Colorado, as well as the District of Columbia, have passed similar laws modeled on Oregon’s.

Rep. Mitch Greenlick, a Democrat and chairman of Oregon’s House Committee on Health Care, began looking into expanding the state’s Death with Dignity law a few years ago, when a wellknown 78-year-old lobbyist in Salem fatally shot himself in the head after learning that he had Alzheimer’s.

“That really shook me up,” said Greenlick, a retired director of the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research. “I started thinking, people with Alzheimer’s should be able to have some control over how they die, rather than having to shoot themselves.”

Some of the efforts have faced opposition from an unlikely adversary: the national right-to-die movement. In particular, groups such as Compassion & Choices, the nation’s largest right-to-die organization, and the Death With Dignity National Center, a main author of the original law, have little appetite for widening access to lethal drugs in the states where medically assisted suicide already is legal.

Yelle is working with state Sen. Arnie Roblan, a Democrat, to advocate an expansion of the state’s Death with Dignity law to include sufferers of not only Parkinson’s, but also Alzheimer’s, dementia, multiple sclerosis, and any “incurable condition that will result in unbearable physical or mental pain.”