Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Table of cases
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I Definitions
- PART II The ethical debate: human life, autonomy, legal hypocrisy, and the slippery slope
- PART III The Dutch experience: controlling VAE? condoning NVAE?
- PART IV Australia and the United States
- 14 The Northern Territory: ROTTI
- 15 Oregon: the Death with Dignity Act
- PART V Expert opinion
- PART VI Passive euthanasia: withholding/withdrawing treatment and tube-feeding with intent to kill
- Conclusions
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
15 - Oregon: the Death with Dignity Act
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Table of cases
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I Definitions
- PART II The ethical debate: human life, autonomy, legal hypocrisy, and the slippery slope
- PART III The Dutch experience: controlling VAE? condoning NVAE?
- PART IV Australia and the United States
- 14 The Northern Territory: ROTTI
- 15 Oregon: the Death with Dignity Act
- PART V Expert opinion
- PART VI Passive euthanasia: withholding/withdrawing treatment and tube-feeding with intent to kill
- Conclusions
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In November 1994 the Oregon Death with Dignity Act, a citizens' initiative, was passed in a referendum by the narrowest of margins: 51% to 49%. Implementation of the Act was delayed pending a court challenge to its constitutionality. On 27 October 1997 the injunction preventing its implementation was lifted by the Federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In November 1997 voters rejected a proposal to repeal the Act by 60% to 40%. Since then, several people have made use of the legislation to end their lives by PAS.
The requirements of the Act
The Act allows physicians to prescribe patients lethal drugs in certain circumstances. The Act provides:
An adult who is capable, is a resident of Oregon, and has been determined by the attending physician and consulting physician to be suffering from a terminal disease, and who has voluntarily expressed his or her wish to die, may make a written request for medication for the purpose of ending his or her life in a humane and dignified manner.
Some of the Act's requirements relate to patients, others to physicians.
Patients
Age
The patient must be an ‘adult’, which the Act defines as an individual aged 18 or over.
Residency
The patient must also be a ‘resident of Oregon’. The Act neither defines this nor lays down a minimum period of residence.
Terminally ill
The patient must be, in the opinion of the attending physician and a second doctor, ‘suffering from a terminal disease’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Euthanasia, Ethics and Public PolicyAn Argument Against Legalisation, pp. 167 - 180Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002