The End in
Two Acts
When he learned there was no effective treatment, when he understood what the end-game would be, he told his family: “I’m just going to take care of this myself.” They knew what he meant.
But David had something that Tom did not. David had family in Oregon. If he moved to Oregon to stay with one of his daughters, he would have — if he cared to exercise it — a choice about how and when he died. He could, unlike Californian Tom McDonald, legally and with medical consultation and support, end his own life.
For almost nine years it has been possible in Oregon — as it is nowhere else in the U.S. — for a competent, communicative, fatally ill person with a documented prognosis of six months or less to live to obtain a prescription from a doctor for a lethal dose of barbiturates. The terminally ill person must be capable of taking the medication him or herself. There are no injections. There is no Dr. Kevorkian standing bedside.
Although Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act is simple and straightforward, the public battle to keep it in place has been anything but. Oregonians passed the law in 1994 (it came to voters as a citizen initiative), only to have it immediately challenged by the National Right to Life Committee, the powerful anti-abortion lobbying group that has also concerned itself with what it calls “euthanasia.” A U.S. district judge ruled in favor of Right to Life, and an injunction against the Oregon law kept it in limbo until the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the ruling a year and a half later.