No "suicide" label on initiative

In a victory for Washington's proposed Death With Dignity initiative, a judge on Friday refused to add the words "physician-assisted suicide" to the ballot or official voters pamphlet description.

"It is a somewhat loaded term," said Thurston County Superior Court Judge Chris Wickham. He said it conjures up images of Jack Kevorkian, the Michigan physician who claimed to have helped more than 100 people die before being convicted of murder in one of the cases.

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. Wickham's decision largely upheld a description written by the state attorney general's office.

The ruling was a setback for critics, including a Catholic doctors group and activists for the rights of disabled people.

Duane French, a quadriplegic state worker who filed the court challenge, had a sign hanging from the back of his wheelchair in the courtroom Friday. "SHAME," it read.

"If people were not ashamed, they would call it what it is: assisted suicide," French said.

"They're trying to hide it," he said during a court break. "They know society really hasn't changed, and people don't support it."

Filed in early January by former Gov. Booth Gardner, I-1000 would allow a doctor to legally prescribe lethal drugs to a terminally ill person who had less than six months to live, so long as two doctors agree that the patient is mentally competent. Writing such a prescription is a felony in Washington. Oregon is the only state that allows it.

Proponents argue that it's inaccurate to call it suicide when a dying patient chooses to hasten death with a prescription. Labeling that "suicide," I-1000 attorney Jessica Skelton said, is "politicized language" that "implies a value judgment and carries with it a social stigma."

Under I-1000, the only assistance by a doctor would be the writing of a lethal prescription. The doctor could not, for example, give a fatal injection.