Halfway through its 2025 session, the Oregon Legislature has me thinking about the late Dr.  Abraham Bergman.

A Reed College graduate, he was responsible for numerous advancements in child safety, including federal legislation on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, poison control and flame-retardant children’s sleepwear. Despite those successes, we’re still quarreling over other issues – firearm safety, homelessness and behavioral health care – because people in power didn’t listen to him.

A Seattle native, Bergman was a pediatrician and longtime professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine. I stumbled upon his remarkable story after his death in 2023.

Bergman was a practitioner of political medicine – using the political process to improve community health care – long before “social determinants of health” became part of the common lexicon. He was ahead of his time in the same way as Oregon’s physician-turned-governor John Kitzhaber. (While they still have the opportunity, politicians would do well to seek Kitzhaber’s wisdom on Medicaid, state budget challenges, Oregon’s rural-urban divide and a host of other matters.)

Mere months before his death at age 91, Bergman published a thoughtful essay arguing for the return of asylums – not the cold, massive institutions of old but small supported-living units providing behavioral health treatment and case management in a secure setting.

His essay makes for powerful reading: “Persons impaired by addiction and mental illness who refuse asylum treatment should be compelled to do so.”

Years ago, I was fortunate that my father agreed to emergency hospitalization for geriatric psychiatric care. Often that isn’t the case.

Oregon lawmakers currently are considering making it easier to involuntarily hospitalize a person for mental health treatment. The House Judiciary Committee took an important, bipartisan step this week by unanimously passing HB 2467, sending it to the budget committee.

The family stories told to Oregon legislators echoed Bergman’s experience. His son cycled through behavioral health treatment, the criminal justice system and homelessness. In his essay, Bergman argued that criteria for involuntary commitment should be broadened to cover individuals in danger of personal harm because they are “unable to meet their basic living needs.”

That would serve individuals and society alike while reducing unsheltered homelessness. Thus, he said, bring back asylums – but in a new way.

The U.S. has suffered the perils of not heeding Bergman.

He failed to convince the American Academy of Pediatrics to lead a national bicycle helmet campaign, though Oregon and some other states did mandate their use.

Another failure: He and colleagues proposed a community campaign enlisting police officers, firearms instructors and gun owners to promote safe storage of firearms. Recognizing that many owners desire quick access to their firearms for personal protection, the campaign would have  encouraged use of push-button lockboxes.

Gun-rights groups did not oppose the idea. Neither did they support it financially. And anti-gun groups opposed the campaign, fearing it would legitimize gun ownership, Bergman said. Without money, the campaign never got off the ground.

What a difference that campaign might have made – a national example!

By the time Oregon enacted safe-storage legislation, gun owners were outspokenly divided, as I discussed in a 2022 column. Ideology trumped pragmatism.

In 2025, firearms legislation remains equally divisive across Oregon.