Hawaii’s House of Representatives have “deferred” a medical aid in dying bill.

Hawaii’s House of Representatives have “deferred” a medical aid in dying bill, just weeks after it was overwhelmingly approved in the Senate. The state’s seven-member House Health Committee said the bill lacked appropriate safeguards details about clinical oversight.

“We’re concerned about safeguards, the record-keeping, the physician training to be able to do this prescribing for aid in dying,” said Democrat Della Au Bellati, the chair of the committee.

Republican Andria Tupola, also a member of the committee, said the measure was poorly written. “It literally said you could pick it up from the pharmacy, do it at home, and it didn’t even mandate that someone had to be present and you had to do it in a private place,” she said.

The bill would have allowed would have allowed terminally ill patients with less than six months to live to obtain a prescription for barbiturates.

Bioethicist Wesley Smith said that the defeat of the bill showed that euthanasia was “not inevitable”: “Now, after losing recently in New Mexico, add Hawaii to the “not inevitable” list.”

Assisted suicide goes down in Hawaii
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Xavier Symons

Xavier Symons is a bioethicist and scholar in residence at the Kennedy Institute for Ethics at Georgetown University.

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