Courts and the End of Life - State Legislatures Reject Physician-assisted Suicide

U.S. Supreme Court justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter issued opinions encouraging individual states to enact legislation to permit physician-assisted suicide in selected cases. At the state level, more than thirty bills to legalize physician-assisted suicide have been introduced. As of February 2006, Oregon remained the only state with a law that legalizes the practice. The Oregon legislation was approved in 1994 and reaffirmed by voters in 1997.

Many state ballot initiatives failed to garner enough votes to legalize physician-assisted suicide. Voters in California in 1988 and again in 1992 rejected the initiative. Assembly Bill 651, a measure that would permit doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to terminally ill patients, was to be discussed in the California legislature in March 2006. Washington State voters rejected a physician-assisted initiative in 1991, Michigan in 1998, Maine in 2000, and Wyoming in 2004. In addition, an assisted suicide proposal was shelved in the Hawaii legislature in 2004 and unsuccessful in another try in 2005, and it was being discussed in the Vermont and Arizona legislatures in 2006.