Emmanuel Enwenwen

The End-of-Life Options Act bill came to a standstill on Friday 1^st March, as it failed to pass the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. The bill which sought to make Maryland the 12th jurisdiction to legalize medical aid in dying fails again after several years of trial.

According to the Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City), this failure potentially delays the bill until 2027 when the next legislative term begins. The campaign, driven largely by patients and a national advocacy group called Compassion & Choices Action Network, has faced similar hurdles in other states, where efforts to legalize medical aid-in-dying have sometimes taken decades to succeed. Oregon was the first to enact the measure in 1997 as reported by The Washington Post.

The bill’s failure elicited strong emotions from its supporters, many of whom have experienced years of setbacks on the issue. Among those who testified in support of the bill was Diane Kraus, a 59-year-old Baltimore woman living with metastatic breast cancer. In a news report by Capital News Service, she said she wanted to have the option of medical aid in dying in the event her condition became terminal. “I am worried sick that I may not live long enough for them to pass it during the next legislative session,” said Lynn Cave. As reported in The Washington Post, Cave is a Silver Spring resident with incurable eye cancer that has metastasized to her liver and will eventually cause her organs to shut down.

It is good to note that the votes on this issue have always been tight in the state senate. Lawmakers have always expressed divided opinions over the ethics of allowing terminal patients to end their own lives. According to Sen. Mike McKay the bill’s demise was the right outcome. “I’m actually very pleased…. I know that it’s a very, very personal piece of legislation that affects each of us much differently than [Republicans] to [Democrats] or rural to suburban … There are just people [who] weren’t comfortable moving forward” said Mckay. In the opinion of Sen. William C. Smith Jr. (D-Montgomery) who supported the legislation and had been a bill sponsor in years past, “it’s a vote of conscience. It’s so personal.” The movement, sometimes termed “death-with-dignity” or “aid-in-dying,” came closest to succeeding in 2019 when a bill passed the Maryland House of Delegates, then failed in a tied vote on the Senate floor.

In the course of proceedings of the bill, in an open  letter  dated 30 January, 2024, the Catholic Bishops Conference of Maryland, had expressed their disappointment on the bill. The letter signed by Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, Washington archbishop Cardinal Wilton Gregory, and Wilmington Bishop William Koenig, had said that such bill if passed will “put our most vulnerable brothers and sisters at risk of making decisions for themselves that are manipulated by factors such as disability, mental instability, poverty, and isolation.”

The bishops had called on Marylanders to improve end-of-life care, writing that “it is incumbent upon each of us to ensure that those at the end of their lives can experience a death that doesn’t include offering a form of suicide prescribed by a doctor” as reported in Catholic News Agency.

Photo credit: Maryland Matter news