Oregon Right to Life has been battling SB494 since it was introduced, warning it's a "devious" bill that's "craftily written so as to hide its true content."

SB494 would remove safeguards in Oregon law that protects the right of patients to receive food and water as part of basic treatment. It would give healthcare representatives power to potentially coerce doctors into starving patients against their will. 

Under current Oregon law, if it's unclear what a mentally incompetent person desires or wants, the person's healthcare representative does not have the authority to end the incompetent person's life unless the person is in a specific end-of-life situation. 

SB494 was introduced after a dispute between the husband of an Alzheimer's patient and her nursing home. The patient, Nora Harris, had filled out an advance directive saying she didn't want to be fed intravenously. 

She began needing help using utensils. Harris could still eat with her hands and was still expressing a desire to eat.

Her husband filed a lawsuit to get her nursing home to stop feeding her.

The nursing home, Fern Gardens, said it would not force Harris to eat but that it only wanted to continue providing her the option of basic food and water. Mr. Harris lost; the Harris family maintains that their mother would want to be starved and dehydrated rather than live in such a state. 

The way advance directives currently work in Oregon preserves Oregonians' ability to receive food and hydration even if they lose mental competency. SB494 would undermine this.

"In spite of amendments, SB494 remains a deadly bill," Gayle Atteberry, executive director of Oregon Right to Life, told LifeSiteNews via email. "It is a tragedy that the liberal senators believed the talking points of the big insurance companies and right-to-die proponents about this bill."  (Photo: Gayle Atteberry/via YouTube)

Atteberry said SB494 was sold "as a basic 'update' to Oregon law. The reality is that it will remove current safeguards in Oregon's advance directive statute that protect conscious patients' access to ordinary food and water when they no longer have the ability to make decisions about their own care."
 
Currently, a person in Oregon can fill out an advance directive that specifies the types of care they will want and designates a person as their healthcare representative if they become mentally incompetent. 

"The current form gives ample room for a person to write his/her complete instructions for end-of-life care including if the patient wants tube feeding or not," Oregon Right to Life explains. "The law also limits the authority of a healthcare representative to make decisions for a patient to only what the patient designates on the form."

SB494 removes the advance directive document from established Oregon statute, meaning "there could be situations where an incompetent person's life may be ended according to the wishes of their healthcare representative, even if it's against the unwritten or ambiguously written desires of the incompetent person"... 

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