Five times in the last dozen years, bills on medically assisted suicide have risen in the California Assembly, and five times they have failed.
In every instance, a great deal of the credit for their demise goes to a constituency associated with advancing personal choice and civil rights ”” namely, the disability rights movement.
The latest attempt, Assembly Bill 374, which its backers called the California Compassionate Choices Act, failed to make it out of committee in June. Modeled on a statute passed by Oregon voters in 1997, it would have allowed mentally competent patients, whom doctors found had less than six months to live, to legally acquire lethal prescription drugs for self-administration.
Many disability rights activists contend that the increasingly cost-conscious healthcare system, especially health maintenance organizations, inevitably would respond to legalized suicide by withholding expensive care from the disabled and terminally ill until they chose to end their lives.
“HMOs are denying access to healthcare and hastening people’s deaths already,” said Paul Longmore, a history professor at San Francisco State and a pioneer in the historical study of disability. “Our concern is not just how this will affect us. Given the way the U.S. healthcare system is getting increasingly unjust and even savage, I don’t think this system could be trusted to implement such a system equitably, or confine it to people who are immediately terminally ill.”
It seems that many of those who would “normally” support assisted suicide are discovereing that in a cost conscious society, the “right” to die will become the “duty” to die. While it will not be legislated, persuasion will be brought to bear such that the “patient” is persuated to end his or her life. May God save us from creating such a society.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
The perceived incongruity is not an incongruity at all. There is no, repeat, there is no “right to die.”
What there is, is a right to be treated as though your life has worth and dignity. THAT’s what disability rights groups are all about, and that’s why they oppose so-called “assisted suicide.”
Thanks be to God for them.
Our society is strange and getting stranger. Now “mercy” means “kill ’em before they start costing us”. Lord, please protect me from those who want to “assist” me.+
In faith, Dave
Viva Texas