The people who want to legalize physician-assisted suicide in Washington seem almost obsessive about expunging the words "assisted suicide" from the English language.

I noted earlier that Initiative 1000 would forbid state agencies from using the term. In fact, "assisted suicide" would cease to exist "under the law." The proper term: "obtaining and self-administering life-ending medication."

I-1000's sponsors turned in their signatures today, enough to put it on the November ballot. The Washington Medical Association, an opponent, was ready to pounce. Its president, Dr. Brian Wicks, immediately issued a statement condemning physician-assisted suicide as "fundamentally incompatible with the role of physicians as healers."

One of his gripes had less to do with ethics than with nomenclature:

Under I-1000, if a physician prescribes a lethal overdose, when that physician completes the death certificate, he or she is required — actually required — to list the underlying disease (say lung cancer) as the cause of death, even when the doctor knows full well that the patient died due to the suicidal overdose he or she prescribed. To my knowledge, there’s no other situation in medicine in which the death certificate is deliberately falsified — and in which this falsification is mandated by law.

An analogy might be a cancer patient who has a fatal reaction to chemotherapy. Is it the cancer that killed him or the chemo? The chemo would be listed as the immediate cause of death – and it wasn't even intended to kill him, unlike the drugs used for assisted suicide.

Americans have a habit of trying to soften the reality of death with euphemisms. We don't like to talk about it; we don't like to think about it. "Coffin" smacked too much of the grave, so we substituted "casket." "Tombstone" was more than we could handle, so it's "monument."

But things are what they are. Pretending that a physician-assisted suicide isn't a "physician-assisted suicide" won't make it any less of a suicide assisted by a physician.