Washington's Death with Dignity Initiative is not About "Suicide"

Today's Seattle Times reports that a judge refused to add the words "physician-assisted suicide" to the Washington state's ballot or voter pamphlet concerning Initiative 1000 (the death with dignity initiative). Labeling that "suicide," I-1000 attorney Jessica Skelton said, is "politicized language" that "implies a value judgment and carries with it a social stigma. Instead of "suicide," voters will read that Initiative 1000 would allow some terminally ill patients "to request and self-administer lethal medication" prescribed by a doctor. Judges in some of the early right-to-die cases struggled mightily to avoid describing as "suicide" the choice of even non-terminally ill patients to forgo life-sustaining medical treatment. Today, most state statutes specifically describe the forgoing of life-sustaining medical treatment as not suicide. Justice Scalia famously derided these efforts in his Cruzan concurrence. But it seems to be especially appropriate to describe as "suicide" the taking affirmative measures (like obtaining lethal medication for that purpose) to end life. On the other hand, as certain vocabulary gets captured and tainted by certain groups and associations, it is often time to move on to new vocabulary. The very language of interventions (DNR v. DNAR v. AND) seem to have a material effect on the acceptance of those interventions. A good coverage of these issues is in Kathryn Tucker's Patient Choice at the End of Life, 28 J. Leg. Med. 305 (2007), in which she "urges that value-neutral terms that accurately represent the individual's end-of-life choice be used. Value-laden phrases, intended to spark negative connotations, should be avoided."