Oregon promotes assisted suicide yet trains health workers to prevent suicides

(Oregon Right to Life) The Oregon Health Authority this month reported higher rates of participation in suicide prevention training among state professionals and called for greater involvement from the behavioral and medical health care fields. But the efforts to lower the state’s suicide rate contrast sharply with Oregon’s “Death With Dignity” law that authorizes the assisted suicides of elderly and medically vulnerable people.

In a new state report, the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) said that 81.8% of licensed behavioral health care providers reported engaging in training on suicide prevention from 2022 to 2024, “the highest level of compliance since OHA began reporting on this in 2018.” 

“Since 2019, leaders in suicide prevention in Oregon have made progress in prevention, intervention and postvention work. This includes progress in workforce training,” the report states. 

Oregon’s suicide rate has exceeded the national average for over two decades, the OHA report acknowledged, sparking ongoing efforts to help people struggling with suicidal ideation.

In an article highlighting the OHA report, Oregon Capital Chronicle cited CDC data placing Oregon 14th in the nation for total suicides per 100,000 people. In 2023, the suicide rate was approximately 19.4 per 100,000 people, compared to the national average of 14.1 per 100,000. The reported Oregon average does not include rates of legal assisted suicide.

“Overall, Oregon’s suicide rate is still high,” the OHA report states.

But even as Oregon works to lower the suicide rate, state law authorizes doctors to participate in the suicides of elderly and medically complex people. 

Oregon was the first state in the nation to legalize physician-assisted suicide under the euphemistically-titled “Death With Dignity Act,” which was passed in 1994 and took effect in 1997. The law allows physicians to prescribe lethal drugs to patients diagnosed with a terminal illness and given six months or fewer to live. In 2023, Democratic Governor Tina Kotek signed a law stripping away the DWDA’s residency requirement, thereby allowing Oregon physicians to prescribe lethal drugs to people who travel to Oregon from other states. The rate of assisted suicide prescriptions has increased over time, with a 30% jump in 2023 followed by an 8% increase in 2024.

Last year, assisted suicides made up about 1% of all deaths statewide.

“If Oregon is serious about reducing suicide, eliminating physician-assisted suicide would be a good place to start,” Dr. Sharon Quick, M.D., M.A., President of Physicians for Compassionate Care and an associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, told Oregon Right to Life in a Thursday email. “The numbers of people accessing assisted suicide have increased in every jurisdiction that has legalized it. In addition, there is evidence that rates of non-assisted suicide also increase.”

A 2022 analysis of available data by Professor David Albert Jones, director of The Anscombe Bioethics Centre in Oxford, England, found that “[r]ates of [euthanasia or assisted suicide] increase significantly” and “[r]ates of non-assisted suicide also increase, in some cases significantly,” in places where euthanasia or assisted suicide are legalized.

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“Promoting euthanasia or assisted suicide (EAS) seems to contradict the principle that ‘every suicide is a tragedy,’” Jones wrote in the summary of the analysis.

In her remarks to Oregon Right to Life, Quick said that “[h]elping people kill themselves sends the wrong cultural message—that some lives, especially those with the disability of terminal illness—are of less value and not worth living.”

Raising additional concerns for pro-life advocates, loopholes in Oregon’s DWDA criteria have allowed physicians to prescribe death-inducing drugs to patients for a broad swath of reasons, including diabetes, arthritis, and even anorexia. 

“When death is made a legal solution to one’s life situation, it is not difficult to see how it can expand to non-terminally ill patients,” Quick said.

“Suicide is a tragedy, and assisted suicide is a travesty, not health care,” she continued. “It abandons patients in their most vulnerable moments instead of doing what physicians are supposed to do—journey with patients and help them see that their value is undiminished by their circumstances.”

The apparent conflict between Oregon’s efforts to reduce suicide even while assisted suicide remains legal has been noticed in the legislature as well.

Republican Representative E. Werner Reschke, who represents Oregon’s House District 55, told Oregon Right to Life in a Thursday email that Oregon “is seriously confused concerning the issue of assisted suicide.” ...

Read the entire article at Oregon Right to Life.

Editor's Note: This article was originally published at Oregon Right to Life and is reprinted here with permission.