Post by Logan on Feb 5, 2016 20:21:19 GMT -6
DENVER (AP) — Michael Merrifield, a Democratic state senator from Colorado Springs, has wanted to sponsor right-to-die legislation since he became a Colorado lawmaker in 2003, two years after his father died an agonizing death from pancreatic cancer. He was discouraged from doing so by party leaders.
"It was a really horrible, disturbing and painful death," Merrifield said of his father, Kenneth Merrifield, a Baptist preacher who died in 2001 at age 73. "To see him on his deathbed, unconscious with morphine the last two weeks, screaming in pain before that, pleading with me to get his pistol so he could take his own life . ... He did not die in the way you'd expect from a man of the cloth. He was a dignified man."
Colorado's libertarian political landscape has changed, with a slight majority of voters expressing support for a right-to-die law regardless of party affiliation, according to some private polls. So Merrifield agreed to co-sponsor a right-to-die bill that gets its first hearing on Wednesday before a GOP-controlled Senate committee.
Last year, lawmakers from both parties voted against similar legislation, arguing that it facilitates suicide in cases where a diagnosis may be wrong. One Democratic lawmaker cited her own wrong diagnosis of terminal cancer in voting against the bill.
Read more: www.wyomingnews.com/news/colorado-takes-on-right-to-die-legislation-once-more/article_eb626082-cb6c-11e5-9f58-d7a40a5f0b67.html
"It was a really horrible, disturbing and painful death," Merrifield said of his father, Kenneth Merrifield, a Baptist preacher who died in 2001 at age 73. "To see him on his deathbed, unconscious with morphine the last two weeks, screaming in pain before that, pleading with me to get his pistol so he could take his own life . ... He did not die in the way you'd expect from a man of the cloth. He was a dignified man."
Colorado's libertarian political landscape has changed, with a slight majority of voters expressing support for a right-to-die law regardless of party affiliation, according to some private polls. So Merrifield agreed to co-sponsor a right-to-die bill that gets its first hearing on Wednesday before a GOP-controlled Senate committee.
Last year, lawmakers from both parties voted against similar legislation, arguing that it facilitates suicide in cases where a diagnosis may be wrong. One Democratic lawmaker cited her own wrong diagnosis of terminal cancer in voting against the bill.
Read more: www.wyomingnews.com/news/colorado-takes-on-right-to-die-legislation-once-more/article_eb626082-cb6c-11e5-9f58-d7a40a5f0b67.html