Lawsuit Seeks to Legalize Doctor-Assisted Suicide for Terminally Ill Patients in New York
A group of doctors and terminally ill patients are asking New York courts to declare that doctor-assisted suicide is legal and not covered by the state’s prohibition on helping people take their own lives.
Under
longtime interpretations of state law, a doctor who helps a terminally
ill patient die by providing a fatal dose of medication can be
prosecuted under the manslaughter statute, which covers anyone who
“intentionally causes or aids another person to commit suicide.”
The
lawsuit, to be filed Wednesday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan,
contends that the law was intended to prevent someone from, for
instance, helping a lovesick teenager commit suicide, but not to stop a
doctor from helping a mentally competent, terminally ill patient die.
The
plaintiffs also argue that because doctors are already allowed to help
terminally ill patients die in some circumstances, such as when they
remove life support, the fact that they cannot hasten death for other
terminally ill patients violates the equal protection clause of the
State Constitution.
“What
we will be helping the court to see is there are many instances where
patients under existing law in medicine can invite medical conduct which
precipitates death,” Kathryn L. Tucker, lead counsel in the case and
executive director for the Disability Rights Legal Center, said this week. “Yet it is somewhat random whether any given patient will fall into that category.”
Assisted
suicide — advocates prefer the term “aid in dying” — is legal in only a
few states, including Montana, Washington, New Mexico, Oregon and
Vermont.
Kathleen M. Gallagher, director of pro-life activities for the New York State Catholic Conference,
said that while she had not seen the court papers, the conference was
generally opposed to assisted suicide. “We would make the distinction —
and there are longstanding distinctions which are moral and medical and
legal — between letting someone die a natural death and deliberately
hastening someone’s death by giving them a lethal dose of drugs,” Ms.
Gallagher said.
Ms.
Gallagher said that permitting assisted suicide would undermine the
physician’s role as a healer, and could eventually be used as the most
financially expedient option. “It forever changes the patient-physician
relationship,” she said.
Samuel
Gorovitz, a professor of philosophy at Syracuse University who has
written extensively about biomedical ethics, said the lawsuit struck him
as an effort to circumvent the law by people who thought “that is
easier than changing it.”
Dr. Gorovitz was part of a 1994 report
on assisted suicide by the state’s Task Force on Life and the Law,
which decided that the law should not be changed. Still, he said that,
without expressing his own opinion on the topic, it might be ripe for
review because of experience with assisted suicide in other states and
countries and because of advances in medicine.
The plaintiffs — three patients, four doctors, a nurse and End of Life Choices New York
— are suing the state attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, and the
district attorneys who are charged with upholding the law in
Westchester, Monroe, Saratoga, Bronx and New York Counties, where the
plaintiffs live and practice.
Sara
Myers, one of the patients, has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as
Lou Gehrig’s disease. She uses a wheelchair. Her arms are paralyzed,
her breathing and talking are compromised, and though she can still
swallow, she has to be fed.
Ms.
Myers, 60, did not know precisely when she might want help dying. “The
line in the sand is constantly moving,” she said in an interview. But
she added, “Knowing you have a choice means you don’t have to use it.”
One of the physician plaintiffs, Timothy E. Quill, became a pioneer in the movement when he published an article
in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1991, describing how he
prescribed a lethal dose of sleeping pills for a leukemia patient. A
grand jury declined to indict him.
He
challenged the New York law on constitutional grounds, and the case
went to the United States Supreme Court, which rejected the challenge in
1997. The lawsuit to be filed Wednesday does not raise any federal
issues.
Dr.
Quill, who is head of palliative care at the University of Rochester
Medical Center, said he recently had a patient whose bones were breaking
from advanced cancer, and consciously stopped eating and drinking. “It
took him about 10 days to die,” Dr. Quill said. “You have to be
incredibly disciplined to do it.”
On
the legislative front, State Senator Brad Hoylman, a Manhattan
Democrat, has proposed a law that would permit doctors to prescribe
lethal drugs to terminally ill patients and is seeking co-sponsors. Mr.
Hoylman has said he was inspired by Brittany Maynard, 29, a California
woman with terminal brain cancer who moved to Oregon so she could die
under that state’s law. Through videos posted on YouTube, she became a public face of the “death with dignity” movement, and died in November of an overdose of barbiturates at her home in Portland.
Correction: February 7, 2015
Because of an editing error, an article in some editions on Wednesday about a lawsuit that seeks to legalize doctor-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients in New York State misstated, in some copies, Kathleen M. Gallagher’s job title with the New York State Catholic Conference, an organization that generally opposes such measures. She is the director of pro-life activities, not the director of anti-abortion activities.
Because of an editing error, an article in some editions on Wednesday about a lawsuit that seeks to legalize doctor-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients in New York State misstated, in some copies, Kathleen M. Gallagher’s job title with the New York State Catholic Conference, an organization that generally opposes such measures. She is the director of pro-life activities, not the director of anti-abortion activities.
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