From the Southern California chapter...
Greetings from CMDA So Cal,
Two Democratic members of the California Assembly, Lloyd Levine of Van Nuys and Patty Berg of Eureka, have resuscitated their physician-assisted suicide measure, which failed to get out of committee in the Assembly last year. Their bill is patterned after Oregon's law, which allows doctors to terminate patients lives who are believed to have no more than six months to live. A patient must voluntarily sign a statement requesting a doctor's assistance, but there is no allowance made for the depression that often accompanies terminal illness and clouds a person's judgment. Rather than enabling doctors to help patients commit suicide, the Legislature should consider ways to expand access to hospices and to improve palliative care, which is the relief of chronic pain. Medical experts assert that, with proper palliative care, no patient has to suffer terrible pain in the last days of life. That is why doctor-assisted suicide is as unnecessary as it is ripe for abuse.Carol Hogan
CMDA encourages doctors to take a role in promoting ethical medical practices. If you'd like to keep informed on the fight against PAS visit our CMDA toolkits and the Californians Against Assited Suicide.
It could happen here, it could happen here. People have come to believe that alleviating suffering, at all costs, is more important than ethical medical practice. I'm reading a good book on this subject, more later.
