You No Longer Need to Live in Oregon to Use State's Assisted Suicide Law

Oregon will no longer require people to be residents of the state to use its law allowing terminally ill people to receive lethal medication, after a lawsuit challenged the requirement as unconstitutional. In a settlement filed in US District Court in Portland on Monday, the Oregon Health Authority and the Oregon Medical Board agreed to stop enforcing the residency requirement and to ask the Legislature to remove it from the law, the AP reports. Advocates said they would use the settlement to press the eight other states and Washington, DC, with medically assisted suicide laws to drop their residency requirements as well.

“This requirement was both discriminatory and profoundly unfair to dying patients at the most critical time of their life,” said Kevin Diaz, an attorney with Compassion & Choices, the national advocacy group that sued over Oregon's requirement. Laura Echevarria, a spokeswoman for National Right to Life, which opposes such laws, warned that without a residency requirement, Oregon risked becoming the nation's “assisted suicide tourism capital.” But Diaz said that was unlikely, given safeguards in the law, such as the requirement that physicians determine whether patients are mentally capable; that it is extremely difficult for terminally ill people to make extended trips to another state; and that many people want to die in the presence of loved ones near home—not across the country. “There's no tourism going on," Diaz said.

The lawsuit argued that the residency requirement violated the US Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the right to regulate interstate commerce, and the Privileges and Immunities Clause, which forbids states from discriminating against citizens from other states in favor of its own citizens. The Oregon Health Authority and the medical board declined to comment on why they settled the case. Compassion & Choices sued on behalf of Dr. Nicholas Gideonse, a Portland family practice physician and associate professor of family medicine at Oregon Health and Science University who had been unable to write terminal prescriptions for patients who live just across the Columbia River in Washington state. While Washington has such a law, providers can be difficult to find in the southwestern part of the state, where many hospital beds are in religiously affiliated health care facilities that prohibit it. (More Oregon stories.)