RSSAlberton woman testified passionately for right to die
By CHARLES S. JOHNSON of the Missoulian State Bureau | Posted: Sunday, August 23, 2009 12:00 am
HELENA - Thirty-seven years ago, a woman from Alberton pleaded with Montana Constitutional Convention delegates to add a right-to-die provision to the state's new constitution.
Delegates to the 1972 convention wisely had asked state residents to submit any ideas they thought were worthy of being included in the new constitution. Montanans, of course, didn't disappoint them, forwarding hundreds of different suggestions.
Joyce M. Franks of Alberton submitted this simple-sounding but complex proposal: "Every citizen be allowed to choose the manner in which he dies."
At the public hearing, she stood alone and told the Bill of Rights Committee how her 85-year-old father had died a slow, agonizing death after breaking his hip. He asked her to get some pills from his doctor so he could end his own life. The doctor refused, and he lingered on, slowly deteriorating.
"For eight weeks he died, little by little, minute by minute, day by day," she testified in 1972. "For no one, by denying him death when he desired it, gave him life."
Fighting back tears, Franks continued: "My father had been a farmer, and he had given merciful death to animals who had been pets and companions. He could not stand to see them suffer prolonged and agonizing death when they death when t hey were severely mutilated or dying of illness.
"He was compassionate and merciful. He asked for the same mercy for himself."
Her testimony drew national headlines, but the committee declined to recommend that her proposal be included in the constitution.
Franks didn't give up.
From her home in Alberton, she wrote thousands of letters over the years to legislators, physicians and ministers, among others, arguing for a legal right to die. Her husband, a railroad worker, and their two grown children fully supported her efforts.
Legislators later introduced her idea, but it met the same fate as her proposed constitutional right. People were sympathetic, but they couldn't bring themselves to vote for it.
Yet some ideas, no matter how controversial and seemingly out of step with society's views at the time, have a way of bubbling to the surface years later.
Next month, the Montana Supreme Court will hear oral arguments for or against the right to die. now called "death with dignity."
On Sept. 2, the court will take up the state of Montana's appeal of a landmark December 2008 opinion by District Judge Dorothy McCarter of Helena who ruled in favor of what supporters call "death with dignity."
"The Montana constitutional rights of individual privacy and human dignity, taken together, encompass the right of a competent terminally ill person to die with dignity," McCarter wrote in her ruling. "That is to say, the patient may use the assistance of his physician to obtain a prescription for a lethal dose of medication that the patient may take on his own if and when he decides to terminate his own life. The patient's right to die with dignity includes protection of the patient's physician from liability under the state's homicide statutes.
"The court recognizes compelling state interests in protecting patients and their loved ones from abuses, in protecting life in general and in protecting the integrity and ethics of the medical profession. However, these interests can be protected while preserving a patient's right to die."
This case is attracting national interest. Twenty Montana, national and even one international group have filed amicus or friend of the court briefs for or against the death with dignity right outlined in McCarter's ruling.
Voters in Oregon and Washington, by large margins, passed initiatives making it legal for a physician to help a terminally ill person die. In Montana, the Supreme Court will decide this matter, at least initially.
The right to die remains highly controversial, although I suspect it has at least somewhat more public support than it did when Franks made her lonely public plea.
It's fraught with many compelling legal, moral, ethical, medical and philosophical arguments on both sides that each of us must sort through when even thinking about this issue.
As a young reporter for the Associated Press, I covered Franks' testimony at the 1972 Constitutional Convention. I later interviewed Franks, then in her mid 50s, for a feature I wrote for the Missoulian.
I regret that I lost touch with her over the years.
But the controversial idea that Joyce Franks courageously brought forward nearly 40 years ago soon will have its day before Montana's highest court.
Charles S. Johnson is chief of the Lee Newspapers State Bureau in Helena. He can be reached at 1-800-525-4920 or (406) 447-4066 or at chuck.johnson@lee.net.
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