Assisted-Suicide Bill Dead For Now, And Rightfully So
Good, the assisted-suicide bill is dead.
Senate Bill 128, the euphemistically titled “End of Life Option Act,” had the enthusiastic support of some of the Democratic Party's leading lights, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones and State Controller Betty Yee. The ACLU, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, several AIDS and LGBT groups, the California Association of Nurse Practitioners and the California Primary Care Association were on board as well.
But in the end, the bill lacked enough Democratic votes to prevail.
Tuesday's outcome was hardly a foregone conclusion. The state Senate last month approved the bill 23-15, after the California Medical Association – to its lasting dishonor – shifted its stance from “opposed” to “neutral.”
One simply cannot be neutral on matters of life and death.
I began phoning Inland assembly members yesterday morning to find out where they stood. Cheryl Brown, D-Fontana, didn't return my call. Jose Medina, D-Riverside, and Eduardo Garcia, D-Coachella, went with a tried-and-true wait-and-see approach.
Republicans were on the side of right, acknowledging that hard questions surrounding death and dying are not best answered with state-sanctioned killing.
But, let's face it: Republicans cannot tank a bad bill by themselves. Credit here belongs to Democrats who couldn't vote for something ... well, evil.
Freddie Rodriguez, a Democrat from Ontario and another member of the health committee, seemed to me representative of the moral struggle that played out within his party.
Rodriguez had “serious reservations” about the bill, his spokesman Francisco Estrada said. “He's made no final decision, but he's inclined to vote no,” Estrada told me shortly before SB128's sponsors pulled the bill from consideration. Rodriguez, who prior to entering politics was in the life-saving business as an emergency medical technician, wasn't keen to put his stamp of approval on legislation that endorsed ending lives.
And Rodriguez wasn't alone. Several Latino Democrats expressed misgivings ahead of the vote. Assemblyman Miguel Santiago, D-Los Angeles, called his opposition “an internal struggle of how to look at the end of life.”
Santiago, a Catholic, insisted that he wasn't influenced by religious or political pressure. For most Catholic Democrats these days, abortion is practically a sacrament in its own right.
You can tell a lot about a cause by the language of its proponents. “Pro-choice” is a good example. Who doesn't want to have choices? And being pro-choice sounds so much better than being pro-death, pro-abortion or pro-suicide.
The main proponent of SB128 is a group called Compassion & Choices. (See, choices! What's not to like?) The group was rather insistent that the word “suicide” has no place in the debate. Suicide, after all, has such negative connotations. They prefer more anodyne terms, such as “aid in dying” or “death with dignity,” which obscure the truth and also poll really well.
I realize that morally-tinged language is out of fashion, but most people still understand – even if only at the visceral level – that suicide is wrong and euthanasia is at once inhumane and senseless.
Compassion & Choices may spin all it likes, but the truth remains: Whether it's a doctor administering drugs to end a patient's life or a patient taking the drugs himself, we are talking about a premeditated and deliberate act of killing. We need to call these things by their proper names: murder and suicide.
There was at least some truth in advertising in the “End of Life Option Act” – it emphasized one option only, the worst option of all.
If lawmakers believe assisted suicide is a hard vote, perhaps they should turn their attention to policies that would actually save and extend lives. The Assembly last month approved Assembly Bill 374, which would give doctors a little more leverage with insurance companies and HMOs that insist on exhausting cheap therapies before approving more effective – but more expensive – treatments. That's certainly a start.
Law usually follows culture, but once in awhile culture follows law. There are some things the state must never countenance. We need to be compassionate with the suffering and give succor to the dying. But there is no dignity in deliberately killing the weak and the sick.
This piece originally appeared in The Press Enterprise