Abercrombie slams House for shelving death bill

Former Gov. Neil Abercrombie is blasting a House committee for shelving a high-profile bill that would allow terminally ill patients to obtain prescriptions for lethal doses of medication and says lawmakers should resurrect the measure through a rarely used clause in the state Constitution that would allow for a full floor vote on the bill.

On Thursday, House Health Committee Chairwoman Della Au Belatti (D, Moiliili-Makiki-Tantalus) recommended at the end of a three-hour hearing that Senate Bill 1129 be deferred, a decision that the other six members of her committee signaled they supported. A decision to defer a bill is meant to kill the measure for the year.

“When I saw that this was deferred, I thought, how do you defer something like this? You can’t defer death. It comes to every single one of us,” Abercrombie said Friday in an interview with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. “It’s not a resolution on Mother’s Day or National Dental Week.”

Abercrombie said House members were dodging their responsibilities as elected representatives and trying to skirt controversy by stopping the bill in committee before it could go to a full vote on the House floor.

The bill was a top priority of the Hawaii Democratic Party and passed the full Senate by a 22-3 vote earlier this month. Both the House speaker and Senate president signaled their support of the measure at the beginning of this year’s legislative session, and several past governors, including Abercrombie, had come out publicly in support of the bill.

“In the state Legislature, at a minimum then, it is incumbent upon the Democratic Party representatives to vote on major issues. To run away from it — then why are you in the Legislature? What are you there for?” he said.

“To simply say there is division on an issue, let’s run away — no wonder people get disgusted with politics,” he continued.

Abercrombie suggested that the issue of physician-assisted death was on par with such weighty issues as gay marriage and abortion and should be given the same attention. He said he wasn’t asking legislators to do something he hadn’t done, noting the special session he called on same-sex marriage, which resulted in the passage of Hawaii’s Marriage Equality Act.

“I called a special session precisely because I realized there would not be a vote if I did not do it,” he said. “Believe me, I sat in the governor’s conference room listening to many legislators saying, ‘Please don’t do this,’ some of them very candidly saying, ‘We don’t want to take a vote, we don’t want to put ourselves on the line.’”

Supporters of SB 1129 have argued that terminally ill patients should have the right to decide how and when to die when they feel their suffering has become unbearable. The bill, which was modeled after Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act, enacted in 1997, would apply to residents who have been diagnosed as having six months or less to live.

But members of the Health Committee on Thursday raised a host of concerns about the bill, such as whether there were adequate safeguards in place to protect seniors or the ill from being pressured or tricked into taking such medication. Health Committee members also questioned experts about whether doctors could accurately predict when someone had just six months left to live and raised concerns about misdiagnosis of illnesses.

Belatti said she was not aware of any effort to recall the bill from her committee for a floor vote, an act she said would be “extraordinary.”

“It’s not incidental reasons why the bill was deferred,” she said. “There were some very good questions.”

House Majority Leader Scott Saiki said that to recall the bill, one-third of the House, or 17 members, would have to vote in favor — a motion that couldn’t happen until after Wednesday, which would mark 20 days from the date the bill was referred to the Health Committee.

But he said he wouldn’t be in favor of such a motion.

“It was heard, it was considered and the decision was to defer it,” he said. “I respect the decision of the committee.”

As to Abercrombie’s comments, Saiki said, “I would say that I really don’t need his advice on how to manage legislation at the Legislature.”

House Speaker Joe Souki declined to comment for this story.