LIFE AND DEATH IN THE GREAT NORTHWEST - PART II

Picking up where my last post (Life and Death in the Great Northwest – Part I) left off, Montana’s foray into Death With Dignity isn’t via legislation, as in Oregon and Washington, but via a court case known as Baxter et al v. Montana, filed in October 2007. In it, two severely ill men claim a right under the Montana constitution to physician assistance in ending their lives when their situations become unbearable.

Robert Baxter, 75, has advanced leukemia, and Steven Stoelb, 53, suffers from Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. The kicker is the Montana constitution. In 1972 the state adopted a new document con- taining express guarantees of privacy, and in a second pro- vision, dignity. Wow! Anyone putting a high stake on personal autonomy has to love that. Also, since privacy and dignity are fundamental to the view that individuals should be able to end their own lives on their own terms, it’s readily believable that Baxter and Stoelb could win. Even so, judicial outcomes are tough to predict and groundbreaking outcomes harder yet. The Cali- fornia Supreme Court’s recent decision finding a constitutional right to gay marriage—i.e. no compelling state interest to forbid it—caught almost everyone by surprise.

So, what would a Death With Dignity court victory in Montana mean? The Montana legislature could pass a law, presumably like Oregon’s, regulating how that right should be exercised. In the interim, or if political opposition prevented the passage of a regulating statute, Montana physicians would seemingly be free to prescribe life-ending medications without fear of prosecution if, in their medical judgement, the patient’s request was war- ranted. Similarly, family members would likely be free to witness or perhaps even hand the lethal dose to a willing but enfeebled person.

One nearly certain result would be fierce backlash from religious conservatives, who would try by initiative to delete the operative sections from Montana’s constitution. Otherwise, broad latitude for pregnant women in that state to choose abortion would seem to follow the same logic as a right to Death With Dignity. But the fact that those two sections were included to begin with is evi- dence of how libertarian Montana is, so predicting the success or failure of such an initiative is a roll of the dice. It makes one wonder, however, about the wording that might be in the con- stitutions of two other famously libertarian places, Idaho and Alaska.

That question I’ll research for a future blog. Still, Idaho, which constitutes a buffer zone of sorts between Oregon/Washington and Montana, may be less ripe a field for Death With Dignity. Religious conservatives wield greater power there, reinforced by a fairly large Mormon population in the south along the Utah border. And Utah, well forget it.

Early this decade, when the issue was being debated and defeated at the Federal level, Utah Senator Orin Hatch said such a law was simply unnecessary. "We already have the Second Amendment. Anyone who’s that concerned about ending their life can just buy a gun." Which suggests that a Death With Dignity program in Utah or Idaho might consist of a voucher to pay someone to save your family from having to clean up your house after you’d done the deed. Or would that be deemed a needless state expense?