Gilroy
– A state assembly bill that would give terminally ill patients
the choice to end their own lives is running into vociferous
opposition from religious leaders and social conservatives who say
such a law would be tantamount to sanctioned murder.
Gilroy – A state assembly bill that would give terminally ill patients the choice to end their own lives is running into vociferous opposition from religious leaders and social conservatives who say such a law would be tantamount to sanctioned murder.
“I think it is truly heartless to codify in law that doctors will help people commit suicide,” said Monsignor Francis Cilia, vicar general of the San Jose Diocese and former pastor of St. Mary Catholic Parish. “The stance of the Catholic church is that God gives life and God takes it away. For us to decide is to cross over that line to doing the work of the Creator.”
Under the leadership of the California Catholic Conference, parishioners up and down the state are sending opposition postcards to key legislators. A staffer for Assemblyman John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, said his office has received an 8-inch stack of postcards opposed to the measure in addition to numerous calls for and against the bill.
But another Democratic lawmaker said Monday that the Terry Schiavo case, in which President Bush and Congress intervened to prolong the life of a Florida woman who had been kept alive for 15 years with a feeding tube, may galvanize support for the bill.
“Polls showed that people weren’t too thrilled with the president and Congress,” said Assemblyman Simón Salinas, D-Salinas. “I think that might make people more likely to support a bill that gives people the right to make this decision. That event has heightened the importance and awareness of this bill.”
But the opposition has so far been better organized. Arcadia’s Scholl Institute for Bioethics has submitted a petition with 28,000 signatures to the Assembly’s Judiciary Committee, which will consider the bill on April 12, and organizations such as the Life Priority Network and Center for Bioethics and Culture are also weighing in against the bill.
The center’s national director, Jennifer Lahl, said Monday that health care workers and politicians should devote themselves to easing suffering, not ending it prematurely.
“This isn’t about choice,” Lahl said. “It’s about the role of medicine. Are we going to medicalize killing? The minute doctors and nurses think that it’s not even an option is when we’ll be left as a civilized society to figure out how to help people suffering. I’m a firm believer in what, unfortunately, is a more old-fashioned view that compassion is standing alongside people and suffering with them.”
Called the California Compassionate Choices Act, AB 654 would allow terminally ill patients who are expected to live no more than six months and are judged mentally competent to receive prescriptions for fatal doses of barbiturates. It is modeled after Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act, which has been in place since 1998.
Last year in Oregon, 40 doctors prescribed lethal doses to 60 patients. Thirty-five patients ingested the medication and died. Thirteen died of their underlying illnesses. Earlier this year, one patient survived the medication and then succumbed to his illness.
Of the 208 patients who committed suicide with prescribed medication between 1998 and the end of 2004, 61 percent of them attended college and 43 percent were married at the time of their suicide. The large majority suffered with cancer.
Similar legislation was introduced in this state in 1995 and 1999, and as it has in the past, the issue is taking on a partisan bent. Republican Assemblyman and Judiciary Committee Member Ray Haynes, R-Murietta, said Monday that the bill would not help competent patients so much as endanger disabled and mentally incapacitated people at the mercy of caregivers.
“I think it establishes a really bad precedent by basically telling people that we don’t want you anymore so you should go ahead and kill yourself,” Haynes said. “The burden falls disproportionately on the disabled and the old and turns into a situation where doctors and family members are making decisions without the patient’s knowledge.”
Giving competent people the right to physician assisted suicide, Haynes said, would allow caretakers with power of attorney to make that same decision on behalf of incompetent patients.
“The state of the law gives a conservator the right to make that decision,” he said. “This isn’t about people like Terry Schiavo and this isn’t about competent people, it’s about those marginal people who are difficult to care for and someone is tired of taking care of them.”
Salinas said he has not made his mind up about the bill, but other local Democrats expressed strong support for it, including Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View, who is also a member of the Judiciary Committee.
“I’m definitely going to support it,” Lieber said. “I think that government shouldn’t interfere with the most intimate details of people’s lives. We need to get government out of the business of making the most personal choices for people.”
State Senator Elaine Alquist, D-San Jose, said she will vote for the bill if it reaches the Senate.
“Although my religious beliefs guide me in a different direction,” Alquist said. “I believe in self-determination and the right of the individual to make his or her own decisions.”
When she was in the Assembly, Alquist authored AB 891, a 1999 law that requires nursing homes to offer residents the option to write a living will, which clearly lays out the extent of treatment a patient would want to be kept alive. Jerry Hunter, executive director of Gilroy Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center, said that such directives are still unusual, and that he has not seen a spike in demand despite the massive attention given Schiavo, whose case hinged on her lack of a living will.
“We’ve seen an increase in awareness, but it’s still not the norm,” he said. He also said he didn’t expect the medical community to embrace AB 654.
“It’s onerous,” Hunter said. “It’s not that it doesn’t have merit, but it’s a very complicated process, and as busy as physicians are, and with the possible legal implications, I doubt, frankly, you’ll have overall agreement.”
Several South County doctors contacted for this story either declined comment or did not return phone calls.
