New Jersey lawmakers will likely hold hearings this summer and Utah has scheduled hearings for July, she said. New York - where similar legislation passed a health committee in the state assembly in May - could be the next "significant win," said Manansala. "People should be able to go to a doctor and have these conversations without facing institutional impediments," Whitaker said.Įven as California deals with implementing the new law, advocates are stepping up efforts in state after state. Bills modeled on the California law have been submitted in 18 states and the District of Columbia. Other large California systems, such as Kaiser Permanente and the Sutter Medical Foundation, the two largest HMOs in the state, are setting up procedures for doctors who say they are willing to aid patients seeking this option. The next step, said Matt Whitaker, Compassion & Choices state director for Oregon and California, is to ensure access in a state where the two largest faith-based health care systems, Catholic hospitals and Adventist Care hospitals, have announced they will not participate. It was elaborately constructed to allow physicians, pharmacies and health care systems to "opt out" on conscience grounds. Neither does the law impose participation on people who object. And I wouldn't deny that right to others." I am certain, however, that it would be a comfort to be able to consider the options afforded by this bill.
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Jerry Brown, when he signed that state's law.īrown said that after deep reflection and wide, diverse consultation he concluded: "I do not know what I would do if I were dying in prolonged and excruciating pain. Manansala, who is Catholic, cited the statement from Jesuit-seminary-trained California Gov. It means more people have less suffering." "Aid in dying doesn't result in more people dying. adults said, "When a person has a disease that cannot be cured and is living in severe pain, doctors (should) be allowed by law to assist the patient to commit suicide if the patient requests it."Ĭompassion & Choices political director Charmaine Manansala said politicians should pay attention. Gallup, in a national poll in May 2015 using the hot-button word "suicide," found that 68 percent of U.S. Surveys show most people - of all faiths and none - support this as long as there are adequate legal safeguards such as limiting access to mentally competent adults. Legal aid in dying already has a foothold of national public support. There, she died as she had planned, leaving a legacy of videos, created with Compassion & Choices. Instead, Maynard moved to Oregon to have access to that state's first-in-the-nation right-to-die legislation. In 2014, she was a California newlywed who refused to allow an incurable brain tumor to overtake her last days. That was the view of 29-year-old Brittany Maynard, one of the people who inspired the California law. A lethal prescription, which the law dictates only the patient can administer, merely changes the timing. The real killer, in this view, is the terminal illness or injury. Although the option is a multistep process that can take a few weeks, it can short-circuit months of intractable pain and suffering. It conjures a sense that this is the last autonomous act of a person who, two doctors must certify, is six months from death's door. "Normalizing" this process is the term big with supporters. ( In Montana, the state Supreme Court ruled in 2009 that assisted dying was legal under the state's Rights of the Terminally Ill Act).Īdvocates cheer this " End of Life Option," the formal name of the law that specifically covers only mentally competent adults. It's normal for people to have options, right? They say. Similar laws are already in effect in Oregon, Washington and Vermont.
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Opponents condemn such laws as a plunge into moral quicksand - a looming danger to the most vulnerable in society who may be coerced to end their lives.
![quicksand deaths quicksand deaths](https://www.dellamente.com/quicksand/deathcrse/dthcs04.jpg)
That's the day the nation's most populous state implements a law, passed in 2015, making physician-assisted dying accessible to 1 in 6 terminally ill Americans, according to its national backers, Compassion & Choices. Somewhere in California on June 9, a terminally ill person may lift a glass and drink a lethal slurry of pulverized prescription pills dissolved in water. People sit on the beach and watch the sun set as seagulls fly overhead in Santa Monica, Calif.