The option for terminally ill patients to end their lives with prescribed medication is moving forward to the New Hampshire House of Representatives, but not without strong opposition.

On Monday, the House Judiciary Committee voted 11-7 in favor of House Bill 254, known as “The New Hampshire End of Life Freedom Act.” If passed, it would give terminally ill adults the option to take life-ending medication on their own terms.

The bill now heads to the full House for a vote. A similar bill cleared the House last year but was ultimately rejected by the Senate.

Republican Rep. Katy Peternal of Wolfeboro criticized the legislation, saying each time the bill is introduced, its language uses “euphemisms to cloud the issue.”

She said the bill is misleading, particularly regarding how deaths would be recorded. The bill states that the cause of death on the death certificate would be recorded as the patient’s “underlying terminal illness,” explicitly excluding any mention of the life-ending medication prescribed.

“I find the bill to be deceptive, and at the end, where the cause of death is the underlying illness, not the ingestion of the medication that actually causes the death,” said Peternal. “That level of deception, we will never know how many people actually die this way if we don’t have the truth about how people die, or how they end their lives or whether or not they die naturally. I just certainly cannot vote for deceptive legislation like this.”

Rep. Bob Lynn, the bill’s prime sponsor, compared the recording of the cause of death in these cases to expungement laws in the criminal justice system.

“The law says that somebody who has been convicted of a crime can apply and if they meet the requirements to have their convictions expunged, then they are no longer convicted,” said Rep. Lynn. “I think by the same analogy, the same situation applies here.”

Advocates for the bill see it as a matter of personal liberty, while opponents label it as assisted suicide.

Rep. Kristine Perez, a Londonderry Republican, said that the bill essentially legalizes suicide at the state level and sends the wrong message to younger generations.

“The state says it’s okay to do this,” said. Rep. Perez. “We’re justifying the taking of a human life.”

If the bill becomes law, terminally ill adults 18 and older with less than six months to live could choose to end their lives with medication.

It comes with a long list of requirements that two healthcare providers must provide verification, including that they have healthy mental capacity, are aware of alternative options and are competent to self-administer the drugs.

Ten states, including California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont and Washington, have legalized the end-of-life option, which advocates also call medical aid in dying.

This legislation has always sparked strong reactions in New Hampshire, with residents weighing in on both sides. This year, 622 people submitted written testimony in support of it, while 274 opposed it.

Lynn said the bill doesn’t encourage suicide. He explained that people choosing this option to die with prescribed medication aren’t seeking death but instead want to end the suffering caused by a terminal illness that significantly diminishes their quality of life.

“People don’t want to die, but what they also don’t want to do is to suffer in the last moment, last hours of or days of their death,” he said. “They want to be able to end their lives peacefully.”

Sruthi Gopalakrishnan can be reached at sgopalakrishnan@cmonitor.com