The California bill is modeled after Oregon, which, in 1994, became the first state in the nation to legalize doctor-prescribed suicide. The deadly procedure involves a doctor prescribing a lethal dose of medication to an adult patient who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness.
Proponents argue that such laws are necessary to provide “compassionate aid in dying for terminally ill patients” and point to safeguards similar to Oregon, but the rhetoric obfuscates the real truth.
Disability rights groups, many in the medical community, pro-lifers and others are upset by the new law because of the potential for horrendous abuses of human life. One of their concerns is that doctors are not required to be present when the patient takes the deadly medicine; therefore, there is no way of knowing whether the person is taking the medicine of their own free will.
Carol Tobias of National Right to Life previously pointed out that the law “shows a blatant disregard for the lives of California’s medically vulnerable citizens and sends a message to these citizens that their lives are less worthy to be lived.”
“It is a well-established fact that nearly every terminally ill patient who desires death is suffering from treatable depression,” Tobias said. “In Oregon, fewer than 6% of patients have been referred for psychiatric evaluation before obtaining life-ending drugs.”
The California law requires that patients be mentally competent to be approved for doctor-prescribed suicide; however, psychiatric evaluations are not required.
Profit-driven motives of families, doctors, insurance companies and the state also are concerns. Assisted suicide is cheaper than many medical treatments for the terminally ill and disabled. In Oregon, there have been several cases of cancer patients being pushed toward assisted suicide because it was cheaper than the medical treatment they needed.
At least one California doctor is planning to make a business of helping people commit suicide. The Mercury News reports Dr. Lonny Shavelson is ready to welcome assisted suicide patients to his Bay Area office on Thursday. His new office is focused solely on “helping” patients kill themselves through the new law, according to the report.
Disability rights advocate Marilyn Golden said Shavelson’s new practice is alarming. She told the newspaper that the law puts the poor, the elderly and others at risk of coercion and abuse.
“How dogged are they (doctors) going to be in their pursuit of solutions that address the patient’s underlying reasons for requesting death?” Golden said. “If they go all the way to the nth degree of assisting that person, that’s terrific. But it’s worrisome to see people advertising themselves for this, unless they plan on talking everybody out of it by getting them services.”
Euthanasia advocates already are dropping hints about forcing Catholic hospitals to comply with the deadly new law in the name of “access” to “end of life options.” According to the Religion News Service:
The next step, said Matt Whitaker, Compassion & Choices state director for Oregon and California, is to ensure access in a state where the two largest faith-based health care systems, Catholic hospitals and Adventist Care hospitals, have announced they will not participate.The law currently has conscience and religious exceptions for medical professionals who are morally opposed to assisted suicide. However, future measures forcing hospitals to offer or refer patients for assisted suicide are plausible. California recently began forcing pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise abortions.
Other large California systems, such as Kaiser Permanente and the Sutter Medical Foundation, the two largest HMOs in the state, are setting up procedures for doctors who say they are willing to aid patients seeking this option.
Ironically, the bill was passed during a special session of the California State Legislature, which was originally called to address cost savings for the state’s MediCal program. Indeed, there are many who would see doctor-prescribed suicide as a “cost-savings” measure. Writing about the bill’s passage in The New York Times, Ian Lovett included an observation by Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, director of the medical ethics program at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine:
…[Kheriaty] said that low-income and underinsured patients would inevitably feel pressure to end their own lives in some cases, when the cost of continued treatment would be astronomical compared with the cost of a few lethal pills.Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition previously told LifeNews.com that people need to know of the dangers associated with assisted suicide.
“Does legalizing assisted suicide show care and concern to someone who is living with psychological pain? Recently, Dr Will Johnston wrote about a young adult patient who became suicidal after watching a video about Brittany Maynard, the California woman who moved to Oregon to die by assisted suicide,” he said. “A primary risk associated with depression is suicidal ideation. The data indicates that legalizing assisted suicide does not reduce suicide, rather it appears to have a suicide contagion effect.”
Source: LifeSite News
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