Initiative 1000 supporter says ignore actor's ads

LETTER - THE BELLINGHAM HERALD

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Martin Sheen, the TV president, has been on the radio speaking against Initiative 1000 - the death with dignity initiative - calling it "the assisted-suicide initiative" and conjuring up images of depression, vulnerable patients, unnecessary and unethical deaths. On television, for drama's sake, it would probably go that way.

In real life, a similar law has worked well in Oregon for 10 years, without documented abuses. Yes, Mr. Sheen, we need reform in our medical service sectors to make health care affordable and universal. To deny freedom and dignity to terminally ill, mentally sound adults does not advance that cause and is a separate issue.

My father and my husband died of terminal cancers this year. My brilliant, strong, father spent 21 days in a helpless morphine coma, despite having clearly expressed his wish to die quickly.

Mercifully, my husband died suddenly. But he spent his last month dreading a slow difficult death. To have had a choice about how he might die would have comforted him.

If Initiative 1000 fails, I will eventually move to Oregon to prepare, as much as is humanly possible, for a peaceful self-determined ending for my own life.

Turtle Robb

Ferndale

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