Gary Drake said goodbye to family and friends via Facebook. “I love you all, say a prayer for me and see you on the other side,” the always cheerful Florida businessman wrote earlier this year. The terminally ill Drake, whose lungs, bones and kidneys were incurably affected by cancer, was already in Oregon, the first US state to legalize physician-assisted suicide. Now he is “on the other side”.
Cases like that of Gary, who chose medical assistance to die far from his home, repeatedly make headlines in the US media. Thousands of terminally ill Americans have been traveling to the northwestern Pacific state since 1997, when Oregon legalized physician-assisted suicide.
It is less known Breakdown statistics Oregons at the Administration of the medication that the patient painful end should save. The 2023 annual report documents the case of a patient who struggled with death for five days after taking it. “If it had been an execution,” concluded the Catholic Herald, “it would have been a cruel punishment.” Oregon is experimenting with different death cocktails. In 1998, the average duration of death was 22 minutes; last year it increased to 52 minutes.
The Oregon Death with Dignity Act allows terminally ill people with a life expectancy of less than six months to receive medication from their doctors to take their own lives. This has been possible in the neighboring state of Washington since 2009. In both US states, the number of people who died through physician-assisted suicide has been steadily increasing. The proportion of all deaths is now three to four per thousand. In Oregon, at least 367 people died by assisted suicide in 2023, an average of one per day. That was 20 percent more than in 2022.
Figures from 2020 show that a total of around 5,330 Americans received medical assistance received for their death wish. Almost 8,500 received a prescription, according to statistics from the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
Many Todkranke have applied for residency permits in Oregon or other states where physician-assisted suicide is legal. Others like Gary Drake travel there in the final stages of their illness – many without family or friends. Critics condemn this as “suicide tourism.” Twenty-eight died a lonely death last year without a loved one to hold their hand in their final minutes because they didn’t know, according to the Oregon report.
Several states have followed Oregon’s lead; Similar legislation is in the pipeline in 19 states, including Kentucky, Maryland and Iowa. There is a bill in Kansas that would criminalize physician-assisted death. West Virginia is asking voters in a referendum to enshrine the current ban in the constitution.
The discussion on the topic runs along medical, ethical and religious arguments. Incurable patients should have access to medically assisted dying, says Lachlan Forrow from the Bioethics Center at Harvard University. At the same time, states should make more efforts to improve their palliative medicine and thus create an alternative.
Medical euthanasia
Catholic doctors mostly reject medical assistance in dying. It contradicts “both his faith and his work as a doctor,” says the chairman of the Catholic Medical Association’s Working Group on Conscience Rights, Tim Millea.
The attitude of the Catholic bishops is also without ifs and buts. Life is sacred, euthanasia is contrary to the teachings of the Church. Against the background of the state of Minnesota’s plans to follow Oregon’s example, local bishop Robert Barron took a clear position. “We don’t live for ourselves,” Barron said. “If we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.”