(NETWORK INDIANA) -Six states have laws allowing doctors to write prescriptions to help terminal patients kill themselves. A Bloomington legislator wants Indiana to be the seventh. Oregon passed the first assisted-suicide law two decades ago, and Representative Matt Pierce’s bill is modeled on it. If you were given six months or less to live, you could request a fatal dose of sedatives in writing. A doctor would have to agree you’d made that decision freely, then wait 15 days and ask you to confirm — again in writing — that you haven’t changed your mind. Then a second doctor would have to give the final okay. The assisted-suicide group Compassionate Choices says in Oregon, the first state to pass a law, a third of the people who get the prescriptions never fill them — but surveys show they feel more relaxed knowing that the option is available. Pierce says the bill includes multiple safeguards to ensure people really are terminal, and have made the decision freely. If a doctor believes a patient has depression or other psychological conditions making them suicidal, the bill would require a referral to a counselor.
– Legislators are setting out to get rid of nearly a third of Indiana’s thousand townships. Then-Governor Mitch Daniels tried a decade ago to get rid of townships entirely. But House Speaker Brian Bosma says 300 townships have fewer than 12-hundred people. He says the Indiana Township Association is on board with a plan to force them to combine with a neighboring township. That would eliminate 12-hundred elected officials: the township trustees and the three-member township boards.