The making of this decision was dogged by excessive passion and woolly reasoning. Although many of the legislators voting against the bill cited their distrust of a Zogby International poll that states that 82 percent of Vermonters favor physician-assisted suicide, none of them provided any evidence that its findings were incorrect. In fact, the bulk of the reasons given for voting down the bill seemed to involve a vague feeling of squeamishness.
For instance, Rep. Mary Morrissey, R-Bennington, has said of the bill, "Polls continue to state that 82 percent of Vermonters support it. I guess if Vermonters read it or hear it often enough, they will believe it."
Rep. Morrissey isn't saying that the poll is wrong. She just has a feeling it could be. Feelings seem to have ruled the day at the Vermont House when it came to this issue. Legislators made vague references to their constituents not liking the measure, or that they had received letters and phone calls from Vermonters who claimed not to be in favor of the measure. Most of the justifications from the bill's opponents, boiled down, translate as "I can't prove anything, but my gut tells me 'no.'"
On the topic of uneasy feelings, the opponent legislators did not trust the Zogby poll's accuracy, but seemed comfortable that they'd gotten a representative sample of viewpoints from calls, e-mails and run-ins on the street. Those Vermonters who were against the bill were extraordinarily vocal this year, but being the squeakiest wheel does not qualify one as a majority.
This was a monumental decision, one with as yet unexplored ramifications for the role of choice and freedom in Vermont, and it was made in part through hearsay, personal conjecture and, it seems, a fundamental misunderstanding of how statistics work.
Vermont is a notoriously independent state, and it's hard to believe that the majority would decide to give up easily on this issue. Rep. Michael Fisher has said he does not believe this bill will come up again for a long time. So long as death and taxes remain the only certainties, we can't agree with him there.