Tuesday, April 7, 2015

California: Vote NO on assisted suicide bill SB 128

Margret Dore
By Margaret Dore

To read my legal/policy analysis against SB 128, (click here). To view supporting documentation, (click here).

Key points include:

People "eligible" for assisted suicide/euthanasia may have years, even decades, to live, i.e., if they don't die of assisted suicide/euthanasia under SB 128. The bill encourages people with years to live to throw away their lives.

The thrust of SB 128 is to protect doctors and other participants in a patient's death, including family members - not patients. This is done in three ways:
  1. Taking the teeth out of patient protections;
  2. Requiring the death certificate, which is the official cause of death, to reflect a natural death; and
  3. A near complete lack of transparency - in Oregon, similar confidentiality provisions preclude disclosure to law enforcement
The bottom line, patient choice and control is not assured. SB 128 is, instead, a recipe for patient abuse. Other problems include steerage to suicide by healthcare providers and the risk of suicide contagion.

Margaret Dore
Law Offices of Margaret K. Dore, P.S.
Choice is an Illusion, a nonprofit corporation
www.margaretdore.com
www.choiceillusion.org
1001 4th Avenue, Suite 4400
Seattle, WA 98154

1 comment:

24AheadDotCom said...

Those are good things to point out, but in order to have much of an impact those who support SB128 have to be confronted with those facts to their faces.

Until leading SB128 supporters are confronted with how they've misled, most of their weak supporters will continue to support them. Confronting them will cause them to lose supporters. That political price will cause them to back off the bill.

This site intends to do exactly that:

http://noeuthanasia.com/

We simply have to engage leading SB128 supporters in debate and show them wrong: there's no substitute for that and SB128 might pass unless that's done.

That doesn't mean people should rely on just one tactic to stop the bill. But, it does mean they shouldn't rule out other tactics (like the one at the site above) that haven't been tried yet. We need to pursue all tactics to stop the bill.