I am always amazed when people still believe legalized assisted suicide/euthanasia is about terminal illness. It isn’t. That limitation is an expedient — an-entry level policy, if you will — to make assisted suicide seem less radical, to get a law enacted, and to persuade people to accept the principle that killing is an acceptable answer to suffering.
The idea is to loosen suicide criteria once it is legalized, after which the “safeguards” used to sell the policy are redefined quickly as “obstacles.” Now, planned legislation in California would repeal the existing six-months-to-live requirement and open the door for easy access to death. From Senator Catherine Blakespear’s “fact sheet” on her plan for the bill, SB 1196:
Since becoming law in 2016, it has become clear two provisions [the six-months-left-to-live and capacity requirements] are needlessly excluding many Californians from accessing aid-in-dying medicine.
See what I mean? The proposed answer to not enough people having access to assisted suicide — as always — is to radically loosen the qualifying criteria:
SB 1196 will replace “terminal disease” with “a grievous and irremediable medical condition.” A grievous and irremediable medical condition is a serious and incurable illness or disease that meets all of the following:
– Places the individual in a state of irreversible decline in capability;
– Causes the individual to endure physical or psychological suffering due to illness, disease, or state of decline that is intolerable to the individual and cannot be relieved in a manner the individual deems acceptable; and
– After taking into account all of the individual’s medical circumstances, it is reasonably foreseeable that the condition will become the individual’s natural cause of death. [Emphasis added.]
That definition is broad enough to drive a hearse through. It could include all manner of conditions, from diabetes, to early stage cancer, to an elderly person becoming frail, to MS, to paraplegia. And remember, it permits someone to qualify even if they decide they don’t want treatment that is medically proven to be capable of ameliorating their symptoms. Indeed, this would allow people with ailments access to hastened death no matter the potential efficacy of care options.
But, wait: Blakespear isn’t done yet! In addition, SB 1196 will:
Expand the EOLA [End of Life Option Act] to those with early- to mid-stage dementia.
This means people with many years to live can access a poison prescription despite the facts that dementia diagnoses are not always certain and that treatment potentials are being continually researched.
Allow for aid-in-dying medicine to be received through an intravenous (IV) infusion.
This means no more need to self-administer the lethal cocktail, creating something very close to lethal-injection euthanasia.
Remove the requirement to wait 48 hours in between oral requests.
Can’t get them dead fast enough!
Remove the California residency requirement.
What California public interest is served by letting an Arizonan travel to the Golden State for snuffing? None. This is a tactic to nationalize assisted suicide. Indeed, expect suicide clinics — as already exist in Switzerland — to be established eventually in states that do away with the residency requirement. (Vermont and Oregon have done so thus far).
Remove the 2031 sunset date.
This was always a sham.
SB 1196 demonstrates the mendacity routinely engaged in by the euthanasia movement. They promise limited access, only as a last resort. But they don’t mean it. These laws are continually expanded over time toward the final destination of death on demand as a human right and euthanasia normalized as the preferred — i.e. “dignified” — way to die.
You might believe in that cause. Fine. But that’s the debate we should be having, not this incremental phony-baloney about terminal illness that hides the movement’s real intent.
It’s all one lie after another. To quote Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: “Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room? There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity. You can smell it. It smells like death.”