Physician-assisted suicide dead in Hawaii?

Doctors are credited with thwarting the bill's passage in the state Senate; similar legislation is pending in Arizona and Vermont.

By Andis Robeznieks, AMNews staff. March 10, 2003.

Even as U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft works to overturn Oregon's law that legalized physician-assisted suicide, bills seeking to enact similar laws have been introduced this year in Arizona, Hawaii and Vermont.

"You have Ashcroft trying to squelch this whole movement, but these bills keep popping up," said Estelle H. Rogers, executive director of the Death with Dignity National Center in Washington, D.C.

Rogers said proponents thought Hawaii would be the most likely state to join Oregon in legalizing physician-assisted suicide, after a bill introduced by its governor last year was approved by the state House yet narrowly defeated in the state Senate.

But now there's a new governor and other things to deal with.

"There was every intention of moving this forward this year [in Hawaii], but a lot of events have eclipsed this as an issue," she said.

There also appears to be another factor in the physician-assisted suicide debate: Physicians.

Legislator Colleen Hanabusa sponsored the physician-assisted suicide bill in Hawaii's state Senate and said physicians helped keep the bill bottled in committee and killed its hopes for passage this year.

"It's basically for all intents and purposes -- no pun intended -- dead in the Senate," she said. "It was mostly the doctors who took the lead. It was a different [public relations] campaign this time around. It wasn't framed in a church kind of presentation."