Newshour profiles Caleb Hepner, a cancer patient who hopes to be able to take advantage of Oregon’s assisted suicide law. I heard this story in the car last night, and was struck to hear Hepner describe how his father died of cancer, and how he hoped to avoid those same last days:

Nobody wants to go through an excruciating last few hours like my father did. I’m thinking about those last hours, when instead of being around my family, being able to talk to them and then pass on very quietly, we’re mopping up blood and they’re trying to manage this horrible, horrible disease process that is just tortuous.

“Death with dignity” isn’t some touch-feely euphemism. The last days of life can be horrifying. Terminal cancer patients typically lose control of their bladder and bowels. More likely, narcotic pain relievers constipate them, requiring enemas or manual cleansing of the colon. They vomit and bleed. They periodically stop breathing, and gasp and convulse for air. Some become delusional. Some slip into a drug-induced haze, far off from friends and family. The overwhelming majority die in hospitals, not at home. Death can come subtly, or it can come violently. It can come with family all around, or it can come unexpectedly, when few are around.

Contrast that to barbituate cocktail used in assisted suicide, which puts patients to sleep, then guides them into a coma, and then, finally, to death. More than 80 percent of the cases so far in Oregon were done at home, surrounded by friends and family. Patients were lucid, and able to say goodbye.

I’m fine with people chosing the former for themselves if moral conviction so compells them.

But it’s incomprehnsible to me that because some people believe the peaceful, painless death to be “immoral,” they’re willing to use the force of law to condemn everyone else to die the hard way.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 6th, 2005 at 6:22 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.