A Montana Senate committee will now decide whether to advance a bill that would take away a patient’s consent as a viable defense in cases of physician-assisted suicide after it heard hours of emotional debate Thursday.
Proponents of Senate Bill 136 argue that the practice of medical aid in dying endangers vulnerable people and corrupts the doctor’s purpose; opponents argue the practice brings a more peaceful end to the terminally ill.
A Montana Supreme Court case in 2009 opened the door for legal assisted suicide in the state when the court ruled in favor of two terminally ill patients who sought to allow a physician to write a prescription for medical aid in dying.
Republican Senator Carl Glimm of Kila is the sponsor of the bill. He has carried similar legislation in past Legislative sessions.
“Physicians should not be helping people commit suicide,” Glimm said. “It endangers the weak and vulnerable. It corrupts the practice of medicine and the doctor-patient relationship. It compromises the family and the intergenerational commitments of caring for one another.”
But Dr. Colette Kirchhoff, a family, hospice and palliative physician, said the practice is not something that any doctor enters into lightly. She clarified that the practice is only used for the terminally ill who have suffered for a long time, and the patient must be of sound mind and able to describe exactly why they wish to end their life.
“This is a transparent, very thoughtful, and peaceful process,” Kirchhoff said. “These people have thought about this sometimes years before they even come on our hospice. They have been suffering and trying so hard to live.”
Montana is one of eleven states in the nation that currently allows the practice of physician-assisted suicide according to the advocacy group Compassion and Choices.
KGEZ 20-20 News thanks Emma White of the University of Montana School of Journalism for her work on this story. The Montana Broadcasters and the Newspapers Associations and the Greater Montana Foundation provided funding for these reports.
