New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Emotions high over aid in dying bill
Proposal would legalize medically assisted death for terminal patients
The Public Health Committee of the Connecticut General Assembly heard public testimony Monday on a bill that would make it legal for terminally ill patients to seek medically assisted aid in dying.
Aid in dying bills have been brought to the legislature in Connecticut more than a dozen times over the past thirty years. If passed, Connecticut would become the 11th state to legalize medically assisted suicide. The Connecticut law would allow a terminally ill patient to request medication from their physician.
Adult, terminally-ill, mentally-competent patients aged 21 years of age or older who had been residents of Connecticut for over a year would be eligible for medically assisted suicide under this legislation.
The law requires two written requests by the patient submitted with a waiting period, a mental health evaluation, and witnesses who are neither relatives nor stand to benefit from the estate to certify the death. Witnesses also cannot be the patient’s doctor or the owner of a health care facility where the patient resides.
Physicians cannot inject or administer the medication, the patient must administer the medication themselves. The law would define deaths by the selfadministration of this medication as not suicide for legal purposes, including criminal prosecution. Terminally ill patients and surviving loved ones testified in favor, citing pain, suffering and dignity in choosing the manner of their own deaths.
“This tumor has robbed me of everything that I have enjoyed,” said Jennifer Eaton Jones on behalf of a terminally ill patient, Dr. Susan Barris, who was too ill to speak. Jones read Dr. Eaton’s submitted testi
mony to the committee. Dr. Eaton is no longer able to move without a walker, fears falling, no longer enjoys eating and relies heavily on others. “There are many times when I have wondered if I would take a pill to end my life. While I’m not there yet, I suspect I will soon will be.”
A total of 122 people signed up to testify both for and against the legislation. State Rep. Holly Cheeseman, R-East Lyme, kicked off the public hearing with impassioned testimony against the legislation.
“I do feel as a people, as a culture, that we should be concentrating on those things that make everyone’s life worth living to the end, to providing palliative care to die in peace and without regret,” said Cheeseman, speaking in favor of a separate palliative care bill while stating her opposition to the aid in dying bill. “We should be with people as they leave this life and not actively shove them out the door.”
Both sides testified about the pain that a loved one’s suicide had caused them. Kira Phillips, speaking in favor of the bill, lost her mother to suicide. Her mother had been suffering from multiple myeloma.
“She ended her life by shooting herself in the head in our backyard, behind the shed. My dad, her husband of over 40 years, had to find her,” said Phillips through sobs. “The radiating spinal pain, chronic sickness and nausea and the fear that she endured led to her desperation. People with terminal illness want to live but they cannot.”
Some including, disability rights advocates and terminally-ill patients, oppose the legislation citing the medical system’s chronic disregard of the elderly and disabled. They fear that this will provide an incentive for the medical system to dispose of people that are “of low value.” “Without a strong universal health care system pushes to withhold treatment for those deemed less profitable, the pressure to cut costs, are huge,” said Deborah Elkin of Progressives Against Medically-Assisted Suicide. “Many people lack the supports to survive and thrive, and those are the people who get the most pressure to end their lives if this skill passes.”
Elkin cited a 2019 study from the Oregon Health Authority, (Oregon’s DPH equivalent), that found that between 1998-2019 roughly half of terminally ill patients expressed concerns about being a burden on families as proof of a financial incentive for medically-assisted suicide. That same study found that 90% of patients said they were less able to enjoy life and were worried about their autonomy. 40% were worried about loss of control of bodily functions. A third expressed worry about unmanageable pain. Financial concerns trailed at 4% over the whole study period.
Opponents were also worried that future amendments, legal challenges and other changes would be pushed by the aid in dying movement, citing legal battles in Vermont and Oregon over residency requirements.
“The people that are pushing for residency requirements in Connecticut have a lawsuit going in Vermont to remove the residency requirements where assisted suicide is already legal,” said Peter Wolfgang, president of the Family Institute of Connecticut a conservative think tank and affiliate of Focus on the Family. “The safeguards here become barriers elsewhere.”
Supporters argue that this is about bodily autonomy and dignity in death. Terminally ill patients, they say, deserve to have their wishes honored in their final moments. Barbra Mancini, a resident of Philadelphia called in to testify about her father’s death in 2013. Mancini had handed her father a bottle of morphine to ease his pain and was charged with homicide after he overdosed. A judge dismissed the charges in 2014.
“I definitely think the failure of hospice was a prime cause of what happened with my father and with me,” said Mancini. She said her father had been denied pain medication by hospice staff and that his pain had escalated in the weeks before his death and that attempts to revive her father went against his do not resuscitate order. “We have to respect individual patients value and wishes and not impose someone else’s values on them.”