Oregon Death With Dignity Act

Oregon Dignity

Oregon's Death With Dignity Act (1994)

In 1994, the Oregon legislature passed Measure 16 of the state's pre-existent Death With Dignity Act. Designed to protect and ensure the medical rights of the terminally ill, the measure was approved by a very slim majority through public referendum, establishing a standard by which physicians may assist, without fear of legal reprisal, in the termination of life for patients who desire an immediate cessation of pain due to intractable and fatal conditions. One of the bill's key segments, section 127.885, indicates that "no person shall be subject to civil or criminal liability or professional disciplinary action for participating in good faith compliance," with the conditions set forth in the measure. (Oregon, 7) This is to indicate that for physicians adhering to the parameters allowing for the administering of life-suspending procedures as set forth in the legislation, the State of Oregon may take no retaliatory action. Such legislation would be the first of its kind in the United States, though it has yet to achieve any genuine penetration to precedent on the federal level.

Though suicide, as an autonomous and self-executed act, is no longer considered a felony, thus removing a sociological obligation to prosecute anybody in the peripheral sequence of such an occurrence, there is still a mire of culturally derived interpretations of the constitutionality of allowing or forbidding physician-assisted suicide. But as it currently stands, the practice is pervasively regarded by United States law as manslaughter, with its perpetrators subject to prosecution to the fullest extent thereof. This is why at present, the American court system "goes beyond attempting to have assisted suicide legalized. Instead, it seeks to have hastened death constitutionalized." (Marker, 6).