As they usually do soon after getting laws passed, supporters of physician-assisted suicide are looking for ways to make it easier for more people to end their life with the aid of a doctor.
The California Legislature’s Select Committee on End of Life Health Care held an informational hearing on the “implementation of the End of Life Option Act Policy” last week. According to the law, the committee is to gather information on how the Act is working or not but has consistently looked at ways the law can be expanded, instead.
Assembly Member Susan Eggman (D-Stockton), coauthor of the California End of Life Option Act, chairs the committee but only a few of the ten other members attended this year. Among the many suggestions from panelists, several themes emerged:
- Interest in reducing the 15-day waiting period required in the law. Oregon reduced the waiting period to 48 hours for those persons who are expected to live less than 15 days.
- Examine eligibility requirements that would allow those with neuromuscular conditions (ALS) and cognitive impairment (Alzheimer’s and dementia) to avail themselves of the lethal medication when they are no longer able to self-administer the drug. In other words, some other person would have to administer the lethal injection.
- Make permissible “telehealth” consults with physicians. Given the lack of physicians willing to help patients die from suicide, proponents are contemplating allowing physicians to evaluate the requests for physician-assisted suicide through electronic means.
California’s bishops, in their statement following legalization of physician-assisted suicide in 2016, foresaw the move to expand the law:
What some mistakenly consider a newfound “freedom,” will inevitably become a duty for others. By allowing doctors to prescribe a lethal dose of drugs to their patients, California is embarking on a dangerous course. This new law will place the disabled, the elderly and other vulnerable people at risk for abuse and mistreatment and will undermine the healing professions’ venerable commitment to “first do no harm.”
The California Department of Public Health’s report on 2019 doctor-assisted suicides will be available this summer but last year’s report indicated that more than 1,100 people had requested lethal prescriptions between June 2016, when the law became effective, and the end of 2018. Just over 800 died from ingesting the medication.
The above comes from a March 6 posting on the site of the California Catholic Conference.
If you’re reading this then you didn’t get aborted. Yay!
These death fanatics aren’t happy about that, and the “choice” to end YOUR life just might be in THEIR hands. Boo!
Eleven hundred requested the ‘prescriptions’. Eight hundred died from ingesting the ‘prescription’ [medications] Any breakdown of the difference? Any ‘cures’ ?
Any natural deaths? etc?
This is frightening and so far removed from the Hippocratic oath all doctors once took.
Gruesome!!
Alas, D equals Democrat, and D equals Death; Democrat equals death…. And she is from the more conservative part of California. Holy Mary Pray for us.
The Culture of Death, as Saint John Paul called this movement, strikes again. Abortion and Euthanasia, those are the Democratic Party sacraments. When killing by Doctors became legal in 2916, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA placed killing homes in service the VERY first day. Of course, these killing fields were placed outside of the Ronald Reagan Hospital to avoid bringing shame to UCLA.
We must fight every step of the way. My beloved sister was allowed to die of thirst and hunger when they (two daughters with Power of Attorney) told the doctors to do it. We had no law in Canada so they did it! She did not deserve to die like this. She had a horrible childhood, then a horrible time as a young adult and married an older man as a father figure who wasn’t of our religion and all she did for the rest of her life was care for him who was 16 years older than her and her six children for the rest of her life. Then a couple of years after he died at 95 she developed Alzheimer’s (though I was never able to detect it on the weekends except for a couple of incidents (I should have been able to because I took care of our mother with Alzheimer’s for 16 years). She was totally physically healthy all her life and was never sick and never had headaches. After the girls got her into a care home, after six years she had a choking incident whereby the nurse in charge was going to let her die (end of life document) but they were delayed because they couldn’t find the other sister for permission. Luckily we dodged that bullet! Then she broke her hip falling out of a bed about 36 inches high off the floor???? And later experienced a headache which caused her to have a stroke, but she wasn’t paralyzed but the girls decided to let her die anyway and ordered the medical people to take away all forms of sustenance, and, six days later she died. Of course she was so drugged up (one drug had to be replaced when I looked it up and told her doctor it wasn’t to be used with a dementia patient) she couldn’t move but my her family had never heard of the Terri Schavio case of recent Pro-Life history and were totally ignorant of the kind of pain they were causing their mom! I tried to get help and called all the leaders in the Pro-Life movement in Ontario but to no avail. So now I am deeply involved in politics now because I learned the hard way ‘the ‘buck stops there’ and will never quit working until we change things or the renewa of the Holy Spiritl comes and everyone can see what they are doing and repent!