CA: Assisted suicide bill headed toward defeat in Senate committee

AP on Bakersfield Californian ^ | 6/27/06 | Steve Lawrence - ap

[NormsRevenge]

A long-dormant bill that would allow the terminally ill to obtain life-ending drugs from their physicians appeared to be headed for defeat Tuesday in a Senate committee after a wavering Democrat turned against it.

Sen. Joe Dunn, D-Garden Grove, said he struggled with how to vote on the bill and ultimately decided it could lead to a broader use of assisted suicide than contemplated by the measure's authors because of future pressures to cut medical costs.

"In this society, more often than not, public policy decisions are driven unfortunately by money concerns, not by policy concerns," said Dunn, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"If the power of money were to weigh in on this issue next year, five years from now, 10 years from now, would we be able to hold this simply to the terminally ill and suffering?"

The bill's chief author, Assemblywoman Patty Berg, D-Eureka, said the eight-year experience with a similar law in Oregon showed that Dunn's fears wouldn't come true.

"There has never been any question among rational people that this practice would be expanded and offered to people who are not dying," she said.

But Susan Penney, an attorney for the California Medical Association, said the Oregon law hadn't been in effect long enough to ensure that it wouldn't be extended to cover more than the terminally ill.

"It's entirely premature to argue that there is no slippery slope," she said.

The legislation would allow a physician to prescribe a self-administered, life-ending drug for an adult who requested it and had been found by two doctors to be mentally competent and within six months of death.

After an earlier version of the bill stalled in the Assembly last year, Berg and her chief co-author, Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, D-Sherman Oaks, amended aid-in-dying provisions into another measure that already had passed the Assembly and was awaiting action in the Senate.

Last week, Berg said she was confident the Senate would approve the revised bill and send it back to the Assembly, where she was close to lining up the votes needed to move the measure to the governor's desk.

But a spokesman for Berg, Will Shuck, said the bill was doomed without Dunn's vote on the five-member Judiciary Committee.

"We needed all three Democrats, and we don't have all three Democrats," he said.

Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, was the only committee member to vote for the bill on an initial roll call. The committee delayed announcing a final vote as it took testimony on other legislation Tuesday but the outcome seemed clear.

Tom McDonald, a Lake Oroville man who is dying of cancer, pleaded with the committee to approve the bill.

"There is no more urgent need in my view than providing better choices for the terminally ill patients like myself at the end of our lives...," he said. "Don't condemn me to a death ... with unbelievable pain and no relief.

"I've had a wonderful life," he added. "I can accept my death. I just want to face that death with compassion and dignity and some measure of control."

Levine said that many terminally ill patients already take their own lives and that the Berg legislation would give those patients a better option.

"This (already) happens," he said. "It happens violently. ... Our bill isn't whether we're opening a door but under what context the events happen behind that door."

But Holly Swiger, a member of the board of directors of the California Hospice and Palliative Care Association, said approving the bill would send the wrong signal, "that we would not be able to do the harder work of pain and symptom management at the end of life."

Berg said Dunn's decision was a "crushing disappointment."

"To have the bill fail because one senator has no faith in the legislators who will come after us is truly devastating," she said in a statement. "Terminally ill patients in California deserve better than this. They deserve choice, and I am just heartbroken that I was unable to give it to them."

[NewRomeTacitus]

I don't know, Norm. Should those seeking an ending with a modicum of dignity be denied their wishes for the sake of the squeemish or should we be forced to go out screaming in agony or drugged to stupidity?

The end of one's life is too personal and metaphysical to legislate, IMO.

[Mears]

As a 73 year old woman assisted suicide would be my choice---when the time comes.