This week, Washington joins Oregon as the only two states in the nation allowing terminally ill patients to take their own lives with lethal doses of legally obtained drugs.
From Saturday’s edition:
Just one of Snohomish County’s four hospitals, Cascade Valley Hospital in Arlington, plans to allow its doctors and other health care providers to give life-ending drugs to patients who meet the legal requirements.
The county’s three other hospitals, Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Stevens Hospital in Edmonds and Valley General Hospital in Monroe, will not allow the practice to occur within hospital walls. Elsewhere in the story Barbara Coombs Lee, president of Compassion &Choices, a Denver-based organization that advocates physician-assisted death.says hospital policies against life-ending medication are empty gestures because in most cases, terminally ill people die in hospice care, often at home. Later in the story Lee said she hopes the new law will encourage people to stop referring to the practice as “suicide.”
“That’s like calling people who jumped from the World Trade Center, with flames at their back, suicidal. They’re not suicidal, they don’t want to die, but they are dying. They are hoping to choose the least-worst way.”
This story stirred some strong reader comments. From one who opposed the law:
I do have to thank the Herald for letting me know which hospitals want to assist in this barbaric practice, I will make sure that my family and friends stay clear of those hospitals and deliver their health care dollars elsewhere.
Which prompted this response: You don’t get to decide what treatment is ‘moral’. If you don’t like the law, get out of the profession!! If the law says it’s a treatment option, and you are capable of providing it, then provide or leave. I am sick and tired of a microscopic minority of moral mavens inflicting their will on others. Follow the law or go away.
> Give us your news tips. > Send us a letter to the editor. > More Herald contact information.Talk to us
