Lawmakers gear up for marathon public hearing on bill allowing terminally ill patients to obtain a doctor’s help to end their lives

Christopher Rossetti has long supported the concept of allowing doctors to prescribe a lethal dose of medication to terminally ill patients.

But he did not become a vocal advocate for the idea until he received his own devastating medical diagnosis.

“It became more important in my mind when I got my diagnosis last September,” said Rossetti, who has a rare form of eye cancer that currently has no effective treatment and typically ends in death by liver failure.

“It’s a real life situation here for me,” the 67-year-old lawyer from Avon said in an interview this week. “It brought things into clearer focus.”

Rossetti backs House Bill 6425, which would allow terminally ill patients with less than six months to live to obtain a physician’s help in determining the timing and manner of their deaths. Nine states and the District of Columbia have passed similar laws.

The legislature’s public health committee is scheduled to hold a public hearing on the bill, beginning at 9 a.m. Friday and likely lasting for many hours. (The hearing is remote and will air on YouTube.)

This isn’t the first time Connecticut lawmakers have considered the issue: bills have been filed in eight of the past nine years and hearings were held in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2018 and 2019. But aid in dying legislation has never come up for a vote at the committee level or in either chamber of the General Assembly.

The concept has long been among the most emotionally wrenching tackled by lawmakers. Critics of the legislation include the Catholic Church, which believes life is sacred, and some disability rights activists, who formed the grassroots opposition group, Second Thoughts Connecticut. They expressed concern that such a law could be used to target vulnerable people.

“By passing such a bill, we as a society, will be implicitly stating there is a time in a person’s life that it has no value to oneself or to others,” Karen Shields Wright, a patient advocate from Greenwich, said in an email sent to the public health committee. “It’s a slippery slope that could lead to such things as ending a life as a cost-containment strategy especially for those who are in a most vulnerable state, the elderly, the disabled, mentally ill, or those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged.”

Supporters, including Compassion and Choices, a national advocacy group for aid in dying, said the Connecticut bill has safeguards embedded within it to protect the vulnerable from coercion. The measure would require two physicians to sign off on a patient’s request and would only be available as an option to people 18 or older who are mentally competent.

Unlike most issues at the state Capitol, questions of life and death do not sort themselves into easy ideological categories. Instead, opinions are shaped through personal experience.

Jill Hammerberg’s husband, Mark Fey, experienced an agonizing death in 2012, after 17 years of living with prostate cancer.

When the doctors told him his cancer could no longer be treated, Fey told his family that he had no regrets and they promised that he would no longer have to endure accelerating levels of pain.

The reality, said Hammerberg, was far different.

“On that last day, our nurse checked in with us in the morning and told me that my husband would begin ‘breaking down’ any time now. She gently suggested keeping a pile of dark towels by the bed as he was likely to start bleeding through any or all orifices,” Hammerberg said.

Later that night, Fey woke up in excruciating pain. “Those haunting sounds will be with me always,’' Hammerberg told lawmakers in an email. The pain relief provided by hospice proved inadequate, she said.

“I’m sorry I broke my promise,” Hammerberg told her husband. She said she remains convinced that his suffering could have been avoided had he had access to medication to end his life.

But opponents of aid in dying, including some physicians, say the timing of a terminally ill patient’s death can be difficult to predict. “I have sent older patients with multiple medical problems to the medical intensive care who have a poor prognosis and are expected to die, yet improve and are able to be discharged home with improved quality of life,” Dr. Barry J. Wu, professor of clinical medicine at Yale School of Medicine, told the public health committee in written testimony.

“On the other hand, I have had younger otherwise healthy patients hospitalized for a treatable condition and planned to be discharged that have unexpectedly died,” Wu said. “Moreover, I have sent terminally ill patients with metastatic cancer and end stage kidney disease who have stopped dialysis to hospice to die, yet have walked out of hospice and lived several more months.”

As a physician, Wu said he fears such legislation could lead to an abuse of power. “I am not to act as God,” he wrote.

Rossetti said he views the issue as a matter of civil liberties. Not every terminally patient will seek a physician’s help to end their lives, he said.

“I see it as a right,” Rossetti said. “And to me, it’s very obvious that it’s a good thing ... for individuals to have this right ... and not unduly prolong their suffering.’'

Peter Wolfgang, the executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut, has long been an opponent of aid in dying legislation. But he said the experience of the past year, living through the coronavirus pandemic, has strengthened his resolve to fight the concept, even though the bill would not apply to people dying of COVID-19.

“This has been a horrible year for the elderly in Connecticut and around the country,” Wolfgang said. “So many people have been left to die alone, [with the sense] that their life has no value.”

To approve aid in dying in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic “is to be absolutely deaf to human crisis we’ve all experienced this past year,” he said. “After everything the elderly have been through, to throw assisted suicide into the mix, to add this sense that some lives aren’t worth living, that some people are better of dead, puts us down a very dark road.”

Daniela Altimari can be reached at dnaltimari@courant.com.