Suicide Measure Fails in Key Test

In a hushed hearing room packed with hundreds of people, a single state senator on Tuesday derailed the second attempt to legalize assisted suicide in California.

Before he cast the deciding vote against a measure that would have allowed people with less than six months to live to get a lethal prescription, Sen. Joe Dunn (D-Santa Ana) said he feared such a law would eventually be expanded. He raised the specter of the Netherlands, where doctors are allowed to kill people suffering unbearable pain.

After much soul-searching, Dunn said, he worried that assisted suicide might eventually be extended to people who were incapacitated or disabled but not terminally ill.

“I could not resolve the risk that the power of money would ultimately define the parameters,” said Dunn. “And so with heavy heart today, I will be a ‘no’ vote.”

After the vote, Dunn said he was alluding to a possible lack of government funding for end-of-life care or health plans that might seek to shave costs.

“There is no one I’m pointing the finger to at this point,” he said.

Disabled activists had argued that health-maintenance organizations and insurance companies would steer people with expensive maladies toward suicide if it were legalized.

“I’m just very, very glad that Sen. Dunn is not as naive as the proponents to think that assisted suicide could operate without corporate- and profit-related pressures from health insurers, from the rest of the healthcare industry, whether public or private,” said Marilyn Golden, policy analyst with the Disability Rights, Education and Defense Fund.

Dunn’s vote in the five-member Senate Judiciary Committee ends a two-year campaign by two Democrats to copy an Oregon law that they promised would give Californians “death with dignity.”

In a Capitol hallway minutes after the vote, the bill’s author, Assemblyman Lloyd Levine (D-Van Nuys), told a 76-year-old supporter dying of melanoma, “We’ll keep fighting.”

“If I’m around,” answered Tom McDonald of Oroville, “I want to help.”

The bill, AB 651, would have copied an eight-year-old Oregon law that allows terminally ill people to kill themselves, usually with an overdose of barbiturates, after evaluation by physicians, repeated statements of their wishes and a two-week waiting period. Patients must take any lethal prescription themselves, without help.

Like Oregon’s law, the California legislation would have allowed doctors to refuse to participate.

Dunn, a trial lawyer who lost his bid for the Democratic nomination for state controller in the June 6 primary election, acknowledged there is no evidence in Oregon that HMOs or other providers hasten people’s death for financial reasons. In that state, 246 residents have used the law to commit suicide between 1998 and 2005.

The bill got two “yes” votes, from Democratic Sens. Martha Escutia of Whittier and Sheila Kuehl of Santa Monica. Republican Sen. Tom Harman of Huntington Beach voted no, and Sen. Bill Morrow (R-Oceanside) was not present, so the bill lacked the majority needed for passage.

Co-author Assemblywoman Patty Berg (D-Eureka) called it “truly devastating” that the bill failed because “one senator has no faith in the legislators who will come after us.”

“Terminally ill patients in California deserve better than this,” she said. “They deserve choice. And I’m just heartbroken that I was unable to give it to them.”

Berg and Levine proposed similar legislation last year that passed two Assembly committees. But the full Assembly never voted on it because the authors did not think they had enough support for passage.

The bill faced strong opposition from Catholic and disabled groups, and was opposed by the California Medical Assn., which represents the state’s doctors. Several senior groups made passage of the bill a top priority.

The more than 120 people who addressed the Senate committee on the bill included doctors, religious leaders and disabled people arguing for and against the measure.

Disabled activist Alan Toy said he had faced a backlash from other disabled friends for supporting it.

“Providing options for dying people does not and should never impact or change what happens to people with chronic disabilities,” he told the committee.

Levine said he and Berg may try to revive their legislation before the legislative session ends in September.

Barbara Coombs Lee, executive director of the nonprofit Compassion & Choices, who pushed for passage of Oregon’s law and lobbied for AB 651, said her group would not try again in the Legislature. A ballot measure would be “much too expensive, much too inflammatory,” she said.

“Politicians let their people down today in a very big way,” said Coombs Lee. “People who were relying on them for comfort and choice were just abandoned.”