News From the End of Life: Oregon vows to fight ruling on assisted suicide
January 1, 2002 less than 1 minute read
News From the End of Life: Oregon vows to fight ruling on assisted suicide
Oregon officials have denounced U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s ruling that blocks the use of Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide law, and they promise to fight the ruling in court.
Opponents of physician-assisted suicide applauded Ashcroft’s November ruling, while terminally ill Oregonians scrambled to fill their prescriptions as their window for state-sanctioned suicide began closing.
"The timing of this is really pretty astounding," says Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber. "This attorney general is supposed to be figuring out who’s responsible for the anthrax. We’ve got an overloaded medical community and an overloaded public health system, docs who are trying to respond to this. And to introduce this divisive issue at this point in time is just, to me, unthinkable."
Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers and the advocacy group that drafted Oregon’s law say they will seek a court order from U.S. District Court in Portland to prevent the Drug Enforcement Administration from taking action against doctors.
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