Shrouded in the cloak of providing a full range of medical services to women and complete choices of end-of-life care, Monica Harrington is running on a platform of trying to force Peace Health into performing/participating in elective abortions and physician-assisted suicides for terminally ill patients. These are two huge issues, but regardless of where you stand on these issues, they should not be issues in this election.

Peace Health as a Rural Critical Access Hospital collaborates with other hospitals on services they cannot provide. We all like the idea of seeing our children/grandchildren born on the island. This however is neither practical nor medically desirable. The medical requirements for a hospital to provide a delivery room include: having on call 24/7 an obstetrician, an anesthesiologist, specially trained surgical staff and RNs, a respiratory therapist, and a pediatrician/neonatologist. The low volume of island births simply cannot support that extraordinary expense. To help accommodate the medical needs of island women PIMC leases office space to a midwife and two OB/GYNs who come to the island to provide gynecologic and prenatal care. These patients deliver their babies at Islands Hospital in Anacortes where there is a complete maternity ward.

With total disregard for the women involved, Monica Harrington would like us to believe that the few elected abortions of island women would be best served on island. To this end she is pushing the ACLU to file a lawsuit against Peace Health claiming that the maternity care provided by Islands Hospital is a benefit of Peace Health and therefore that “substantially equivalent benefits for abortion” needed to be provided. (Note: The Public Hospital District Board does not have the authority to force Peace Health to do elective abortions.) Should this lawsuit not be thrown out as frivolous, but actually won, it would not require Peace Health to do elective abortions, but prohibit them from leasing clinic space to OB/GYNs if they did not.

Peace Health honors and encourages advance directives; legal documents that allow individuals to make decisions about end-of-life care ahead of time. Peace Health respect a patient’s right to refrain from aggressive or curative treatment, even when such a decision may result in a patient’s death. The “death with dignity law” allows patients to self-administer lethal drugs after they have been confirmed terminally ill by two physicians, had psychiatric consultation and then waited at least 15 days before picking up the prescription to self-administer in a private place. The fact that Peace Health and its physicians do not participate should not be a concern. This is not a hospital procedure. Peace Health providers may direct patients interested in information about physician assisted suicide to the local medical society, the Washington Hospital Association, or the Washington Department of Health.

The real issue here is providing high quality medical care to all of our island residents within the constraints of our size and funding. I urge you to vote the real issue in this nonpartisan election and vote for Jenny Ledford.

Janelle Teasdale

San Juan Island