In Oregon, you may barely know the doctor who issues your lethal prescription

Doctor-shopping makes it easy to find a doctor if your own balks at killing you
By Matt Hadro
(CNA/EWTN News)
PORTLAND, Ore.

Requests for physician-assisted suicide in Oregon in 2015 almost doubled over 2013, records for the state’s public health authority show.

“What’s happened in America, and particularly in Oregon, is that we are changing absolute values, and then replacing it with personal choice,” Gayle Atteberry, executive director of Oregon Right to Life, told CNA.

According to data published by the Oregon Public Health Division in February, there were 218 lethal prescriptions written there in 2015, a sharp increase from 155 in 2014 and 121 in 2013.

These prescriptions are legal for terminally-ill patients who request them, as long as they find a physician willing to issue them. There are some regulations: two physicians have to confirm details such as a patient’s home address and their ability to make the decision.

Physician-assisted suicide is also legal in Washington and Vermont, while a law has passed in California but not yet gone into effect. The “Death With Dignity” movement has worked to have the practice legalized in all states.

The proliferation in cases of physician-assisted suicide in Oregon has brought with it evidence of troubling incentives for depressed patients to quickly kill themselves without a lengthy period of consideration.

For instance, only five of the 132 persons who took lethal medication in 2015 in Oregon were referred for psychiatric evaluation. Some years no referrals are made, Atteberry noted.

“They’re not receiving any sort of help. It’s being ignored,” she said.

According to a study conducted a few years ago and published in the British Medical Journal, a survey of 58 adults who had requested a lethal prescription or had shown interest in doing so found 26 per cent of them had depression.

Atteberry said that Compassion & Choices, which works to spread the availability of physician-assisted suicide, has been pressuring more doctors to honour the requests of patients for lethal prescription.

Sometimes little more than a phone call is needed for the prescription.

Although few doctors could originally be counted on to reliably hand out lethal prescriptions, the number is increasing.

“We have doctor-shopping, because if a patient’s own doctor says no, it’s not the least bit difficult to call up Compassion & Choices and find a doctor who will,” Atteberry added.