A Marine Corps veteran who survived brain cancer despite a terminal diagnosis is fighting back against a local bill that would legalize euthanasia in Washington, D.C.
J.J. Hanson was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in 2014 and told he had four months to live.
"This was a very vulnerable situation for me," Hanson said. "I did question whether I should continue to battle. I wasn’t in the right state of mind."
Had the Marine veteran lived in Oregon, the four-month diagnosis would have been enough to receive a prescription from a physician to end his life. He is grateful that the option was not available to him.
"I would have had the pills right next to me on my nightstand. I would have had the easiest ability to commit suicide at that point in time," he said.
Hanson’s experience overcoming a terminal brain cancer diagnosis led him to found the Patient Rights Action Fund, an organization dedicated to ending physician-assisted suicide in the United States. His work will bring him to Washington, D.C., next week, as members of the Council of the District of Columbia weigh a bill that will allow physicians to prescribe suicide pills to residents who have been diagnosed as having fewer than six months to live.
The council’s health committee will vote on the Death with Dignity Act, sponsored by Democratic Councilwoman Mary Cheh, in October. Cheh has been studying end-of-life care since 2011 and said that the nation’s capital is ready to join five states that allow some form of physician-assisted suicide.
The bill would require at least two doctors to sign off on a terminal diagnosis and psychiatric evaluation. The patient must consume the lethal pills personally with no assistance from a doctor or family member.
"I think people are entitled to have the choice to make this decision. It is a matter of autonomy, self-determination," she told the Washington Free Beacon. "You are already dying, so you choose the time and manner of your death.
Hanson disputes the notion that assisted suicide enhances autonomy. He said the availability of the pills encourages suicide as a spur-of-the-moment decision rather than the thoughtful, consent-driven decision that proponents of euthanasia describe in arguments. Hanson added that a one-time psychiatric evaluation and lack of oversight once pills are dispensed at the pharmacy send the wrong message to terminally ill individuals, who are up to four times more likely than the general population to be depressed, according to a Fraser Health study on palliative care.
"When you’re in a state of depression you are not in the right place of mind to make a decision about whether to end your life in assisted suicide," Hanson said. "If they put a gun in your hand at that time you would say it’s madness … [with pills] you’re putting them in a more vulnerable situation. You’re glorifying death to them."
Euthanasia has received increased scrutiny after a Belgian teenager became the first legal minor to commit suicide with the help of state physicians on September 17. Cheh disputed the notion that the District of Columbia could follow the slippery slope that foreign pioneers of euthanasia have traveled down over the past two decades. She said the progression will mirror that of Oregon over the past 18 years and that safeguards will limit the practice to terminally ill patients, not expand it to include depressed and disabled patients.
"It’s a very small set of people who choose this, qualify, and get the medication. One-third of them don’t even use it," Cheh said. "This is not me in this moment thinking life has become problematic for me. These are people dying imminently."
Opponents of physician-assisted suicide said there are plenty of options other than lethal drugs for those in the final stage of their lives. Marilyn Golden, a senior policy analyst at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, said that sedation and palliative care, in which the patient receives medication that relieves pain until natural death, are widely available. She said that safeguards can not fully relieve the pressure patients may face from insurance companies, government health plans, and even relatives to end their lives, because the cost of a lethal dose of pills "immediately becomes the cheapest so-called treatment."
"Financial and emotional pressures can make people choose death," Golden said. "This is the kind of problem that no simply written legislation can get around."
The Washington, D.C. Committee on Health and Human Services is expected to debate Cheh’s bill in October.