SACRAMENTO — Backers of a proposal to allow terminally ill Californians to hasten their deaths with lethal drugs pointed Thursday to legalized assisted suicide in Oregon, where a new report shows it is used sparingly.
Forty-six Oregon residents, most of them cancer patients, used the law to end their lives in 2006, according to the Oregon Department of Human Services' ninth annual report on the so-called Death with Dignity Act that voters there passed in 1994.
That law is unique in the country. Two Democratic lawmakers in California are making their third attempt in three years to enact a similar law here.
Since the Oregon law took effect in 1998, only 292 of about 86,000 likely eligible residents have used the lethal prescription to end their lives. To be eligible, people must be Oregon residents, diagnosed with less than six months to live and deemed mentally capable of making medical decisions.
"I think the experience in Oregon should reassure Californians that end-of-life choice greatly benefits patients and their families," said Keith Graham, a doctor in rural eastern Oregon who helped one patient use the prescription last year.
His patient, an 80-year-old with cancer, wanted to die at home rather than in a nursing home, he said.
"She was able to choose the time and place," said Graham. "She died in the bedroom that she and her husband had shared in the house they had built, surrounded by her five children and many, many grandchildren. The house was just full. It was a very smooth transition. It was very peaceful. The family was very grateful."
The California bill, AB 374 by Assembly members Patty Berg (D-Eureka) and Lloyd Levine (D-Van Nuys), is opposed by the Catholic Church, which considers life, from conception to natural death, sacred.
The bill is also opposed by some activists for the disabled, who say they fear that people with chronic medical troubles will be pressured by a cost-conscious medical system into ending their lives under such a law.
Tim Rosales, spokesman for AB 374 opponents, said the limited use of the Oregon law calls its value into question.
"You don't make public policy in this way just to affect a narrow swath of Californians," he said, "especially when you have issues related to health insurance, the uninsured, the poor, completely different demographics in California than you have in Oregon.
