BEND, Ore. — Barbara Jones thinks her mother was unjustly denied necessary food and water, which led to her death. Lida Jones, 93, died Sept. 11, 2001, at the Central Oregon Healthcare Center in Bend.

According to her health care providers, Lida Jones was in an irreversible coma brought on by a stroke three months before. Yet her daughter believed that, although unable to communicate or feed herself, her mother was conscious and aware of what was happening to her.

“She had a stroke, but her underlying illness was that she was old,” Barbara Jones said. “This was not humane, and it was not a ‘good death.’ They just withheld food and water and allowed her to die.”

Some think Jones' experience is becoming common, as quality-of-life evaluations become part of medical decision-making. Although the number of assisted-suicide cases in Oregon remains small — 129 deaths in five years — many times that number might have been killed without their knowledge or consent as a result of what Dr. Kenneth Stevens calls “a mentality that says either you're healthy or you're dead.”

Stevens, head of the department of radiation and oncology at Oregon Health and Sciences University and president of Physicians for Compassionate Care, is one of several people saying the application of the “quality of life” standard is leading the medical profession away from providing care and toward choosing who lives and who dies. Assisted suicide is only a small part of that trend.

Oregon Right to Life Executive Director Gayle Atteberry says her organization is concerned.

“We've heard a lot on the withholding of food and hydration,” she said.

Atteberry said more and more, people are “deciding that either this isn't a life worth living or that [the patient] is going to die anyway.”

Robert Castagna, executive director of the Oregon Catholic Conference, said the Archdiocese of Portland and Diocese of Bend have been an “exemplary follower of the Church's teachings on life-sustaining treatment, but one is not morally obligated to take measures where the burdens exceed the benefits of extraordinary life-sustaining treatment.”

Castagna said the Oregon Catholic Conference is concerned “state budgetary problems mean Oregon is not fully and adequately addressing the needs of patients.” He said Oregon's dioceses also hope the ruling against Attorney General John Ashcroft's December 2001 ban on use of prescription drugs for administration of assisted suicide, issued April 17, 2002, by U.S. District Judge Robert Jones, will be overturned this year by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In his Feb. 24, 2002, address to the Pontifical Academy for Life, Pope John Paul II upheld all life as valuable, irrespective of qualities such as independence. The Pope said the belief in autonomy and individual freedom as giving life value “is a false interpretation, free from any reference to the truth of human nature.”

“Among the fundamental rights of man, the Catholic Church claims for every human being the right to life as the primary right,” he said. “She does it in the name of the truth about man and to protect his freedom, which cannot be sustained without respect for the right to life. Every human being, from the moment of his conception until the moment of his natural death, possesses an inviolable right to life and deserves all the respect owed the human person.”

— Philip S. Moore