Terminally ill people will no longer be subject to a residency requirement to seek physician-assisted suicide in Oregon.
Compassion & Choices, a national advocacy group, sued Oregon. Kevin Diaz, an attorney with the group, stated, “This requirement was both discriminatory and profoundly unfair to dying patients at the most critical time of their life.” The group plans to pressure the eight other states and DC with aid-in-dying programs to lift their residency requirements.
The Oregon Health Authority and the Oregon Medical Board settled in the U.S. District Court in Portland on Monday, agreeing to stop enforcing the residency requirement and to ask the legislature to edit the law.