Oregon ends residency rule for medically assisted suicide

By GENE JOHNSON
Associated Press

Oregon will no longer require people to be residents of the state to use its law allowing terminally ill people to end their own lives, after a lawsuit challenged the requirement as unconstitutional. The national advocacy organization Compassion & Choices and an Oregon Health and Science University professor of family medicine, Dr. Nick Gideonse, sued Oregon last fall. In a settlement filed in U.S. District Court in Portland on Monday, Oregon’s attorney general agreed to stop enforcing the residency requirement and to ask the Legislature to remove it from the law. Advocates said they would use the settlement to press the eight other states and Washington, D.C., with medically assisted suicide laws to drop their residency requirements as well.