California and Assisted Suicide

 

Judge to hear lawsuit challenging California’s law against assisted suicide

By Dave Andrusko
  Even the famously ultra-liberal California legislature recently balked at passing an assisted suicide law, SB128. Why?
According to bioethicist Wesley J. Smith primarily because of the opposition of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the disability rights community. Smith quoted from a column in which an Assembly staffer who was monitoring the bill “said his boss had received 30 calls so far against the bill — and two for it.”

This is worth noting, Smith said, because this shows “assisted suicide is not driven by public demand, but rather, is a top-down ideological movement mostly pushed by the privileged who never have to worry about poor care or abandonment.”

But concurrent with the debate in the California legislature is the campaign to legalize assisted suicide whose public face is Christy O’Donnell, who testified on behalf of the failed legislation. (More about her below.) Naturally “O’Donnell, two other terminally ill Californians and a San Diego doctor seeking such a right” are “backed by Compassion and Choices, an advocacy group that has supported legislative efforts and similar lawsuits in various states,” the Associated Press reported today.

They have brought a lawsuit against the state and a San Diego Superior Court judge was expected to hear a motion to dismiss the lawsuit today. According to the AP

The lawsuit asks that the court impose an injunction on the current law, declaring it unconstitutional as applied to doctors who prescribe fatal medication for mentally competent, terminally ill adults who can administer it themselves when the suffering become unbearable

  For the moment, let’s ignore the multiple elephants in the room, such as how imprecise “terminally ill” is; how in other states people are not required to have psychological evaluations to be sure they are truly “mentally competent”; and that “suffering” has already been ruled elsewhere to include mere “dissatisfaction” with life.
To its credit, the AP story, written by Julie Watson, goes beyond the puff pieces that appear in places like PEOPLE magazine where O’Donnell is routinely (and favorably) compared to Brittany Maynard, the California woman who moved to Oregon so she could be “assisted” to die.
O’Donnell describes herself as both “conservative” and “Christian,” a single mom who has “reconciled my own religious beliefs with this decision.”
Watson added context to the lawsuit as well as comments from critics. She wrote

Some advocates say they thought the nationally publicized case of Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old California woman with brain cancer who moved to Oregon to legally end her life last fall, might usher in a wave of state laws allowing doctors to prescribe life-ending medications.

But no states have passed right-to-die legislation since Maynard’s death in 2014, and efforts have been defeated or stalled in several states.

Proponents now are banking on a court ruling in the nation’s most populous state…

That failure to win, albeit by only one vote in one state, explains why pro-assisted suicide forces are counting on the courts to win what they lose in the legislatures. What “progress” pro-assisted suicide forces have made in Montana and New Mexico are because of judges.
Watson added

Tim Rosales, a spokesman for California Coalition Against Assisted Suicide, said the lawsuits show right-to-die advocates are getting desperate after the setbacks. He said people, especially the low-income, may turn to fatal medication to end their lives not because of suffering but because it is the cheapest health care option and they no longer want to be a burden.

“There have been a lot of red flags and concerns raised in bipartisan fashion, not only in California, but across the country against this,” he said.

The concluding paragraphs in an editorial in the Orange County Register show both Compassion & Choices’ misleading strategy and why physician-assisted suicide is wrong: 

Though Ms. O’Donnell expects to be dead before the Assembly revisits SB128, she expects the measure eventually will pass. Indeed, Compassion & Choices, the pro-euthanasia advocacy organization that is a successor to the Hemlock Society, claims that “seven out of 10 Californians want to see this bill become law.”

They base their claim on the results of a push poll last month by a little-known polling agency that asked people whether they agreed with such leading statements as: “If a terminally ill person wishes to use physician-prescribed medication to die, rather than endure agonizing suffering, he or she should be able to do so legally.”

Well, we suspect that even those who oppose physician-assisted suicide would agree if the statement was put to them that way.

We empathize with terminally ill patients like Ms. O’Donnell, who think their lives no longer worth living. Be we remain reticent to support a state law that allows physicians – who took an oath to “do no harm” – to send the terminally ill to premature deaths.

Source: NRLC News