Challenges to Prop. 161 ‘Strong Safeguards’

The recent Commentary by two Orange County physicians in support of Proposition 161 may cause many readers to believe that physicians and other providers of health care are also supportive of this initiative. The record shows that most all organized professional groups in the state are strongly opposed.

Not only have the California Medical Assn. and the Osteopathic Physicians and Surgeons of California gone on record against the initiative, but many local medical associations have as well. Early opposition was declared by the Los Angeles County, San Luis Obispo and Orange County medical societies, and the list is growing.

Individual physicians I have spoken with are also opposed. My own statewide affiliate organization, the California Conference of Local Health Officers, has taken an opposed position, Opposition by other health care providers includes the California Assn. of Hospitals and Health Systems, the California Nurses Assn., the California Psychiatric Assn., and the list goes on.

Why are physicians and other providers of health care opposed? Read the words of the initiative and the answer is self-evident.

This is not an initiative to allow people to die peacefully without undue life-saving measures or resuscitation. In fact, it permits individuals to give written directions to their physicians to perform “a medical procedure that will terminate . . . life. . . .”

Physicians have deep values not only to heal but to sustain life and ease suffering. Those very values for sustaining life may have caused many physicians to avoid learning the art and practice of pain control and other aspects of care for the dying.

That avoidance should compel physicians now to gauge their response to one of compassion, responding with medical practices to ease pain and suffering and to allow people to die humanely and at ease with their families.

L. REX EHLING, MD, MPH. Dr. L. Rex Ehling is director of public health for the County of Orange.