MONTPELIER -- Dr. Robert Orr read the Webster's Dictionary definition of suicide: "The act or an instance of taking one's own life voluntarily and intentionally especially by a person of years of discretion and of sound mind."

How, he asked, is that different from proposed legislation that the House Human Services Committee is considering that would allow a terminally ill patient to hasten dying with a lethal dose of medication?

"We're trying to change the dictionary definition we've been working with for years," he said.

Dick Walters, an ardent supporter of the legislation, sees the two -- suicide and physician-assisted dying -- as entirely different things. "Suicide is a desperate act," he said. "It's done in a back alley, a barn. It destroys families.

"What we're talking about in H. 44 is something totally different," he said. "They're doing this under care, with loved ones around them. They're saying goodbye in a way supportive of their own values."

This divide over whether to call it suicide or something else is at the core of a complicated, deeply personal and emotional debate. It's easy to tell where people stand on the issue by what they call it. For opponents of the legislation, this is "physician-assisted suicide." Proponents refer to it as "patient choice and control at the end of the life" or "physician-assisted dying."

The state of Oregon, where the law has been in place nine years, changed its policy in October from calling it physician-assisted suicide to physician-assisted death.

Kathryn Tucker, director of legal affairs for Compassion & Choices, which supports patients who want to use Oregon's law, noted that the American Academy of Hospice & Palliative Medicine recently changed its wording, too. The group's Web site says, "The term PAD is utilized in this document with the belief that it captures the essence of the process in a more accurately descriptive fashion than the more emotionally charged designation Physician-assisted Suicide."

In Oregon, where 246 people died with the lethal prescription during the law's first eight years, the patient's underlying disease is listed as the cause of death on the death certificate, Dr. Nick Gideonse, a family practitioner in Oregon, told the House Human Services Committee via telephone Wednesday.

Heather Bartlett, representing the group Teens for Life, testified Wednesday that the bill goes against everything teens are warned about regarding ending one's life when it becomes unbearable. If the law passes, she said, what would prevent a depressed teen from using it as an excuse to end his or her pain?

Walters, a Shelburne resident who helped form the group Death With Dignity Vermont, said the evidence in Oregon suggests otherwise -- that teen suicide has not increased since the law went into effect there in late 1997.

Walters said terminally ill patients who want the choice of ending their own lives differ from suicide victims in a fundamental way -- they want to live, but their illness has prevented that. "They try to live their lives as long as they can," he said.

Dr. David Babbott, also of Death with Dignity Vermont, said, "The term suicide denigrates the process. The 's' word connotes premature, often lonely death."

Rep. Norm McAllister, R-Highgate, a member of the House Human Services Committee who opposes the legislation, disagreed. "You can pretty it up by changing the words. A duck's a duck's a duck."