Sacramento: Special session committee approves aid-in-dying bill

SACRAMENTO — In a room filled with the pleas of the dying, California lawmakers approved a bill that would allow doctors to prescribe lethal prescriptions to terminal patients wanting to hasten their own deaths.

The controversial legislation passed 10-2 in an Assembly special session committee on health on Tuesday, nearly two months after the issue appeared done for the year. The bill now heads to a special session committee on finance.

“This is for the people who got up and said I’d like another choice,” said bill author Assemblywoman Susan Talamantes Eggman, DStockton. “It is one more option in the array of things we can offer people when they are faced with a terminal diagnoses and facing the end of their life.”

Lawmakers pulled a similarly worded bill from the Assembly Health Committee in July after supporters could not persuade enough Democrats to approve SB128. Instead of forcing a vote, the bill’s authors withdrew SB128 from the committee and appeared to be on track to take it up next year.

But after the Legislature returned from summer recess last month, lawmakers instead announced that the bill was renamed ABX215 and would be heard in a special session on health care instead of during the regular session. The move allowed the bill to bypass the Assembly’s regular session health committee and go to a smaller special session committee on health that does not include several of the Democrats who had opposed the bill.

The move proved successful Tuesday, despite opponents arguing that the maneuver essentially allowed lawmakers to ram the bill through the Legislature. Gov. Jerry Brown, who called the special session to deal with funding shortages in the Medi-Cal system, has not publicly weighed in on the aid-in-dying legislation, but his spokeswoman said it would be “more appropriate” for the bill to go through the regular session in 2016, not the special session this year.

Eggman said there are too many people waiting in pain for lawmakers to defer the issue to next year.

“Is special session the right way to do this?” Eggman said. “People don’t have time to wait ... until a ballot initiative next year or for it to be more convenient for the Legislature to tackle this issue next year. People die every day looking for something like this.”

California lawmakers modeled their bill after Oregon’s nearly 2-decade old assisted-dying law. The bill would require two California physicians to agree that a mentally competent person has six months or less to live before prescribing a lethal prescription to a patient.

An amendment Eggman agreed to add to the bill on Tuesday says 48 hours before a terminal patient takes the lethal pill, they would have to attest in writing they are taking the prescription on their own accord. The amendment helped earn support from Assemblywoman Catharine Baker, R-San Ramon, who became the first Republican to vote for SB128 or its latest version ABX2-15.

Opponents of the bill include the Catholic Church, some disability rights organizations and the Association of Northern California Oncologists, which said the bill runs contrary to the physician’s oath to do no harm.

Marilyn Golden, a senior policy analyst at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund in Berkeley, said safeguards in the bill are not enough to protect the vulnerable, who could be pressured by greedy family members to take life-ending drugs.

“Adding this so-called choice into our health care system will push people into cheaper lethal options,” Golden said. “There is no assurance that everyone will be able to chose treatment over suicide.”