Five times in the last dozen years, bills on medically assisted suicide have risen in the California Assembly, and five times they have failed. In every instance, a great deal of the credit for their demise goes to a constituency associated with advancing personal choice and civil rights — namely, the disability rights movement.
The latest attempt, Assembly Bill 374, which its backers called the California Compassionate Choices Act, failed to make it out of committee in June. Modeled on a statute passed by Oregon voters in 1997, it would have allowed mentally competent patients, whom doctors found had less than six months to live, to legally acquire lethal prescription drugs for self-administration.
Many disability rights activists contend that the increasingly cost-conscious healthcare system, especially health maintenance organizations, inevitably would respond to legalized suicide by withholding expensive care from the disabled and terminally ill until they chose to end their lives.
"HMOs are denying access to healthcare and hastening people's deaths already," said Paul Longmore [pictured at left], a history professor at San Francisco State and a pioneer in the historical study of disability. "Our concern is not just how this will affect us. Given the way the U.S. healthcare system is getting increasingly unjust and even savage, I don't think this system could be trusted to implement such a system equitably, or confine it to people who are immediately terminally ill."Longmore was stricken with polio in 1953, when the Salk vaccine, which would eradicate the disease, was first undergoing clinical tests. Now 60, he has limited use of only one hand and is dependent on a portable ventilator for breathing.
Disabled people, Longmore said, "probably even more than most other citizens, understand the kind of suffering and needless pain that's inflicted on a lot of people and leaves some of them to prefer to die when they can't get the help they need."
Disability rights advocates "have a lot of credibility on this," said Marilyn Golden, a policy analyst for the Berkeley-based Disability Rights Education Defense Fund who lobbied hard against AB 374. "We are on the front lines of this issue as it actually plays out in the medical system..."
