The following comes from a Jan. 28 posting on CalWatchDog.com.
Physician-assisted suicide has returned to California’s political agenda. After years off the table, the issue gained new life in the wake of Brittany Maynard’s high-profile decision to end her life.
Maynard, 29, an assisted-suicide activist living in Oregon, advertised her impending death as a dignified response to the “aggressive” form of terminal brain cancer that left her with a few painful months of natural life. Maynard moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Oregon to avail herself of the state’s 1997 law authorizing a narrowly tailored right to die at the hands of doctors.
Now legislators in Sacramento have borrowed the language of that law to draft a version that would protect assisted suicide throughout California.
Despite the vogue for so-called “death with dignity” bills, which are now in the works in 14 states nationwide, opposition to legal suicide is strong enough that California legislators opted to stick with the narrow terms laid down in the Oregon statute.
The bill, SB128, stipulates a long list of conditions that must be met for a person’s request to terminate their life to be fulfilled. For instance, only mentally competent adults given six months or less to live, and equipped with an in-state driver’s license and voter registration, may make the request of their attending physician.
The numerous legal hurdles are part of an effort to ensure the bill is not successfully portrayed as greasing a slippery slope toward fuller suicide rights. In 1992, California voters sank the Aid-In-Dying Act, reversing an apparent trend of support for the measure.
And as U-T San Diego reported, similar bills “were defeated last year in New Hampshire, Connecticut and Massachusetts by a coalition of disability rights groups, medical associations, hospital workers and right-to-life groups.”
Those groups included the Catholic Church, which was instrumental in preventing assisted suicide in California and is expected, like other organizations, to mobilize against the current wave of bills.
Critics also point out the experience in the Netherlands, which had 6,000 cases in 2014 out of a population of 17 million, is that limits on euthanasia can be expanded. London’s Daily Mail quoted Dr. Peter Saunders, “What we are seeing in the Netherlands is ‘incremental extension,’ the steady intentional escalation of numbers with a gradual widening of the categories of patients to be included.”
The delicate wording of SB128 nevertheless struck a clear contrast with the political imagery and posturing surrounding the bill’s introduction. Maynard’s husband and mother made the case for the bill at an uncharacteristically raw news conference where nine California legislators announced the legislation.
“She recognized that to stay in California would mean she potentially would face a horrific death,” her husband, Dan Diaz, told reporters. “Brittany was a Californian. We lived in this state and she would have preferred to pass away peacefully in this state.”
State Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, who co-sponsored the bill with state Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel, echoed Diaz. “The fact that Brittany Maynard was a Californian suffering from an incurable, irreversible illness who then had to leave the state to ease her suffering was simply appalling, simply unacceptable,” she said.
Although Wolk, Monning and their allies have successfully capitalized on Maynard’s plans to make assisted suicide a fresh issue, they face opposition from political figures who can make or break SB128. Although in 1976, Gov. Jerry Brown approved a legal right for terminally ill patients to end so-called life-sustaining treatment, it’s unclear whether he’s willing to go as far as Wolk and Monning wish. He has yet to make public comment on the matter….
Are attending medical professionals REQUIRED to kill someone upon their request?
All other CA laws deny medical professionals the right to a religious conscience.
Jerry Brown supports abortion – murder of the innocent, so why should he do anything different about murder of the mentally ill, the sick, and the elderly?
He has not been corrected about abortion by his Bishops and been allowed top receive Holy Communion, therefore Bishops of each of the Diocese Brown has lived in as an adult have to bare some of the responsibility.
And Abp Gomez with his “OneLife LA” that mixes all social issues with the right to life issues is guilty as well.
Where are the CA Bishops on this ?
We have known about this goal of murder of the Democratic Party since mid-2014 when they put it in their CA Party Platform.
The Democrat party is the party of death. When they can’t achieve their goal of enough deaths through abortion, then they will try to achieve it through euthanasia. I have no doubt that out Jesuit-educated “Catholic” governor will support euthanasia. If euthanasia becomes law in California, relatives who no longer want to be burdened by sick/ailing relatives will pressure them into asking for euthanasia, especially if the relative(s) may receive an inheritance when the person dies. There are many ways one can easily commit suicide without assistance. Why does the legislature want to enable it? Life is precious.
Ex-Jesuit in Training, Gov. Brown will do whatever his Master, Satan, wishes him to do. Clearly, Brown is one of most lost, evil-enabler, of current State governors. Of course, he is also one of the most honored governors, along with the many, many homosexual practicing and enabling, and pro-abortion, legislators in CA.
Honored by whom, you say? Why Catholics, of course, including its many feckless bishops and colleges and other representatives and groups. Sad to say, the Vatican does nothing to lift the veil on these insults to the Lord and His Church.
Correcting “Catholic” politicians,
and correcting Bishops who refuse to correct a Catholic politician’s support for the INTRINSIC evils of: Abortion, Euthanasia, Homosexual Marriage, Embryonic Stem Cell Research, Human Cloning – is where the Pope needs to focus.
The Pope should speak to all on these significant matters of Faith and Morals.
The Pope is NOT an expert on Economics, Climate Change, Food Production, or Distribution of Goods, and therefore can make errors. He holds no infallibility on these topics.
CCC: ” 2246 It is a part of the Church’s mission to pass moral judgments even in matters related to politics, whenever the fundamental rights of man or the salvation of souls requires it.
The means, the ONLY means, she may use are those which are in accord with the Gospel and the welfare of all men according to the diversity of times and circumstances.”
CCC:” 898 By reason of their special vocation it belongs to the laity to seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and directing them according to God’s will. . . .
It pertains to them in a special way so to illuminate and order all temporal things with which they are closely associated that these may always be effected and grow according to Christ and maybe to the glory of the Creator and Redeemer.”