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The number of people who ended their lives last year using Oregon’s first in the nation Death With Dignity Act declined slightly in 2024, according to a new report from the Oregon Health Authority.
An OHA official attributed the drop-off from 386 to 376 deaths to a 2023 statutory change which allowed people from other states to seek end-of-life prescriptions for the first time.
“What we’re seeing is, perhaps, a cooling of the heightened interest and participation in the Death With Dignity Act that occurred when patients were no longer required to be Oregon residents to receive medical aid in dying,” said Tom Jeanne, M.D., M.P.H.., deputy state health officer and epidemiologist.
Meanwhile, the number of people who obtained the prescriptions that will allow them to end their lives increased from 561 to 607.
Voters originally passed the Death With Dignity Act in 1994. It survived a 1997 ballot measure aimed at reversing it and legal challenges before going into effect.
Oregon Right to Life continues to oppose the law. “Legal assisted suicide sends a harsh message that our state believes some lives—especially the elderly, disabled, and medically complex—are less worth living," Oregon Right to Life’s executive director Lois Anderson said in response to the new data. “Real dignity and compassion is shown in love, care, and support—not in offering death as a solution.”
Despite ORTL’s opposition, lawmakers are considering a bill this session that would make the program far easier for people to use.
Senate Bill 1003, which would allow physicians’ assistants and nurse practitioners to prescribe end of life medications (only physicians may do so now) and would reduce the waiting period between when a patient requests a fatal prescription and when it can be written from 15 days to 48 hours.
The bill is scheduled for a work session on March 31.
This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering rural Oregon.