The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: assisted suicide
Gov. Brown Signs Controversial Assisted-Suicide Bill In California

Gov. Brown Signs Controversial Assisted-Suicide Bill In California

By Patrick McGreevy, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Caught between conflicting moral arguments, California Gov. Jerry Brown, a former Jesuit seminary student, on Monday signed a measure allowing physicians in the nation’s most populous state to prescribe lethal doses of drugs to terminally ill patients who want to hasten their deaths.

Approving the bill, whose opponents included the Catholic Church, appeared to be a gut-wrenching decision for the 77-year-old governor, who as a young man studied to enter the priesthood.

“In the end, I was left to reflect on what I would want in the face of my own death,” Brown added. “I do not know what I would do if I were dying in prolonged and excruciating pain. I am certain, however, that it would be a comfort to be able to consider the options afforded by this bill. And I wouldn’t deny that right to others.”

California becomes the fifth state to allow so-called assisted suicide, following Oregon, Washington, Montana and Vermont.

The new law is modeled after Oregon’s. It permits physicians to provide lethal prescriptions to mentally competent adults who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness and face the expectation that they will die within six months.

The law will take effect 90 days after the Legislature adjourns its special session on health care, which may not be until next year. The earliest likely adjournment would be in January.

The governor’s action caps months of emotional and contentious debate over the End of Life Option Act, which divided physicians, ethicists, religious leaders and the Democratic majority in the Legislature.

“Abx2 15 is not an ordinary bill because it deals with life and death,” Brown wrote in his signing message. “The crux of the matter is whether the state of California should continue to make it a crime for a dying person to end his life, no matter how great his pain suffering.”

Brown said he carefully read input from two of his own doctors, a Catholic bishop and advocates for the disabled, as well as pleas from the family of Brittany Maynard, a cancer victim who took her own life. He said he even has received input from retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

“I have considered the theological and religious perspectives that any deliberate shortening of one’s life is sinful,” he wrote.
Most Republican lawmakers opposed the bill on moral grounds. Democrats who voted against it cited religious views or experiences in which family members given months to live by doctors had lived for years.

Californians have been debating such end-of-life legislation for more than two decades.

State voters in 1992 rejected a broader proposal that would have allowed physicians to administer lethal injections to the terminally sick. Bills offering patients the right to obtain deadly drug doses failed in the Legislature in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Photo: The assisted suicide law California is implementing is based on Oregon’s. Melissa Johnson/Flickr

A Social Worker With ALS Makes The Decision To Guide Her Own Death

A Social Worker With ALS Makes The Decision To Guide Her Own Death

By Esmeralda Bermudez, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

LOS ANGELES — The dishes she used to scrub after each family dinner pile up by the sink. The husband who sweetly called her his trophy wife cries alone in the room where he now sleeps. The 11-year-old son with big brown eyes who once cuddled on her lap now hardly comes near her.

She can’t move. She can’t talk. She can only blink her eyes.

Angie Bloomquist was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis less than two years ago. Since then, the fatal illness known as Lou Gehrig’s disease has shut down just about every muscle in her body. The toll on her family has been almost as devastating.

“It’s like a tornado ripped through our home,” Angie says. “And destroyed everything we built.”

She speaks through a special computer that tracks her eye movement, a painstaking task that exhausts her after a few sentences.

Still, in her final days, Angie finds herself pushing more than ever — for the choice to die through doctor-prescribed medication.

Proponents know it as “aid in dying.” Opponents call it assisted suicide. Since it was legalized in Oregon in 1994, there have been dozens of attempts to have similar versions approved in nearly 30 states. All have failed, except four: Washington, Vermont, Montana, and New Mexico.

In California, the issue hasn’t been brought before lawmakers or voters since 2007. This year, buoyed by the story of Brittany Maynard, who left her Bay Area home for Oregon to carry out her legally assisted death, supporters have geared up for another try.

One bill is making its way through the Legislature. Recently, two lawsuits were also filed against the state aiming to legally protect physicians.
Angie, who says she knew long before she was diagnosed that she would want to hasten her death if she became severely incapacitated, joined one of those lawsuits this month.

“I know how I want to live and know that that life is no longer possible,” she says. “The right to die should be my right.”

Continue reading

Angie’s symptoms began in early 2013, just before her 47th birthday.

The fingers on her right hand twitched and she had trouble typing. She became exhausted walking from the parking lot to her office at Miller Children’s Hospital in Long Beach, where she was a social worker. One day, leaving work, she inexplicably lost her balance and fell hard on a staircase.

In August 2013, after months of tests, Angie and Fred, her husband of 15 years, got the diagnosis: She had ALS.

“My heart sank and my body went cold,” Angie says. “Life, as we knew it, ceased to exist.”

The disease affects the brain and the spinal cord’s nerve cells. It eventually paralyzes sufferers, while their minds almost always remain unaffected.

About 30,000 Americans live with ALS. Half of them die within two to five years. Breathing gradually becomes more difficult, and often, patients suffocate. Cases like that of famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who has lived with the disease for more than 50 years, are a rare exception.

Angie, ever the realist, immediately began planning for her death. She had spent 23 years as a social worker, the last decade in hospitals watching children fight futile battles against ruthless diseases. She had guided families, preparing them for their child’s death.

Now, the time had come to guide her own.

On a recent day, Angie rests in her usual spot in the family’s television room. Fred walks through the 112-year-old Craftsman they share with their son, Andres, and their two dogs, Viejo and Peanut.

The sun is just about done setting over San Pedro. The jasmine climbing over the white picket fence Fred and Angie put up years ago fills their front yard with a sweet scent.

Fred turns on the light in the first bedroom.

“This is where the magic happens,” he says, in a not-so-funny tone. “Or at least, it used to.”

Their former bedroom is now Angie’s room. It has two twin beds: Angie’s hospital bed and, next to it, a bed for her overnight caretaker.

The dresser is packed with a mix of medications, tubes, wipes, drops, syringes.

Fred widened doorways, built a side deck and a wheelchair ramp and remodeled the bathroom to make room for a commode. Soon after Angie was diagnosed, he organized a ceremony to renew their vows. Beneath two white ash trees in their backyard, his wife giggled as he tried to explain, using the lyrics of his favorite love songs, how much he loved her.

“I’ve had some deliriously happy times in my marriage,” he says. “And I know that those moments, unlike the human body, are everlasting.”

Fred tries to be honest with Andres about what’s happening to Angie. But the truth is, most days, they avoid the topic.

“I’m not really the talking type,” Fred says.

He has to be strong for Angie — a woman who used to shush rowdy neighbors in her pajamas at 3 a.m. and throw bouncy castle parties for some 20-plus 5-year-olds. When he cries, he cries alone in his room, off the kitchen.

That’s the thing about losing the girl of your dreams. Day in, day out, it hurts like hell.

“I’m not going to reduce her to a few fanciful stories,” Fred says. “She was too vast, too great. She was a tidal wave.”

Continue reading

The Bloomquists thought of going to Oregon, but qualifying for the law could take months. Angie also considered refusing food and slowly drifting to her death through sedation, but that’s not how she wants to go.

The lawsuit is being handled by attorney Kathryn Tucker, executive director of the L.A.-based Disability Rights Legal Center, who’s overseen these kinds of cases on a national level for years.

Proponents are ready to go to the ballot in 2016 if the pending legislation fails. Tucker believes a court decision is the best way for California to win approval. She’s had recent success with similar lawsuits in Montana and New Mexico and has another one pending in New York.

Despite the traction supporters have gotten recently, the issue faces great opposition. Doctors, Catholic leaders and some disability rights advocates object on ethical, religious and medical grounds.

“If assisted suicide is approved, it would result in many lives ending without their consent,” says Marilyn Golden, senior policy analyst with the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund. “No safeguards have ever been enacted or proposed that can prevent that outcome, which can never be undone.”

Golden says combining a profit-hungry health care system with assisted suicide could result in patients being denied care and steered toward dying. Heirs and caregivers could also become abusive, and mentally ill or suicidal patients who are not terminal would have few safeguards to protect them from killing themselves.

Tucker says if the lawsuit succeeds, those safeguards — such as requiring a physician’s second opinion and judging metal competence — would be left for doctors to decide.

As for Angie, attorneys say they plan to lobby the court for a special permission to help her die as soon as possible — at her home, with her family by her side. She entered hospice care recently and may not have more than a few months to live.

“She’s accepted that this disease has brought her to the doorstep of death,” Tucker says. “She just wants to be able to have a measure of control to have a more dignified and peaceful death.”

Continue reading

Each day after Andres leaves for school and Fred heads to work, Angie’s three-hour routine begins. It takes her that long to move from her bed to the recliner in the television room.

Estella Ganuza, her morning caretaker, feeds her through a tube. It’s a struggle to not choke on her saliva.

Then, like a stork carrying a sleeping child, Ganuza uses a hydraulic machine with a giant sling to lift Angie’s limp body from the bed onto a commode. She wheels her into the shower, dresses her, combs her hair and transports her in the sling to her recliner.

Here, in the book-filled room where the family used to watch TV after dinner, she remains until night falls and it’s time to go to bed.

Her loved ones have stitched together a round-the-clock schedule of care, with one relative watching over Angie each day of the week. They bring food, do laundry, wash dishes, sweep the floors. Fred handles weekends.

Her mother massages her hands and feet. Her best friend from second grade goes on Costco runs. Her former hospital colleagues drop by and share stories that make Angie’s eyes light up.

“I love them and don’t know how I would have coped without their daily presence,” Angie says.

Her worst fear, she used to tell everyone, was losing her ability to speak.

How would she connect to the ones she loved the most?

When Angie’s speech went away about six months ago, she felt Andres begin to drift from her.

Maybe it’s his age. Maybe he just doesn’t know what to say or how to say goodbye.

He goes to therapy, at Angie’s request. He likes to play and joke with Fred. He’s a bright boy who says he’s proud of his mother, above all else, “for putting up with me.”

After school each day, he bolts through the front door, straight into the television room.

“Hi, Mom!” he says.

He leans over the recliner and, for the briefest moment, lays his head on Angie’s chest.

Angie closes her eyes.

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Fred Bloomquist reaches out to touch the cheek of his wife of 15 years, Angie, in their San Pedro home. “She’s my everything,” Fred said. (Katie Falkenberg/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

California Senate Panel Endorses Bill Allowing Terminally Ill To Commit Suicide

California Senate Panel Endorses Bill Allowing Terminally Ill To Commit Suicide

By Jessica Calefati, San Jose Mercury News (TNS)

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Legislation that would allow terminally ill Californians to take their own lives cleared a major hurdle Wednesday, winning the approval of the state Senate Health Committee on a party-line vote.

Senate Bill 128 was written for Brittany Maynard, a young California woman whose public struggle last year with aggressive, inoperable brain cancer and her choice to end her life sparked international debate about the morality of assisted suicide.

The Senate committee’s endorsement of the bill came after more than two hours of emotional testimony that moved lawmakers and others seated in the packed hearing room to tears.

“Being a good mother meant letting (her) go when everything inside of me screamed, ‘Hold on,'” said Maynard’s mother Deborah Ziegler, who didn’t support her daughter’s choice to die until she started watching her suffer.

Supporters of California’s so-called right-to-die legislation say a change is desperately needed to give the terminally ill greater control over deaths that will otherwise be gruesome and painful, while opponents say the measure is poorly crafted and would foster abuse of the elderly.

“Do not mistake temporary popularity with wisdom,” said Warren Fong, president of the Medical Oncology Association of Southern California and an oncologist. Prescribing life-ending medication would violate a doctor’s oath to do no harm, he said.

“We’ve asked oncologists, ‘Would you do it?’ and they all say ‘No,'” he said.

Democratic state Sen. Lois Wolk, a sponsor of the legislation, said she was “thrilled” with the committee’s 5-2 vote in favor of the measure, but said she knows the proposal’s path to becoming law will be rocky.
Gov. Jerry Brown, a practicing Catholic, hasn’t taken a position on the bill but may oppose it for religious reasons.

The California Catholic Conference released a scathing statement Wednesday afternoon following the committee vote, saying it would continue to “actively and vigorously” oppose the bill.

“We understand and share the concern for the dying expressed at today’s hearing. It is a natural impulse for human beings,” said Ned Dolejsi, executive director of the California Catholic Conference. “But when someone asks for assistance in killing themselves, it is really a call for help, care, and compassion during the dying process.”

Earlier Wednesday, an advocacy group and the family of Maynard, a former East Bay resident, released a video that was recorded a few weeks before her death last year in Oregon from brain cancer. She argued that all terminally ill Californians should have the right to die comfortably at home.

The ease she sought wasn’t available in California, her home state, but Maynard and her family are fighting for change.

“How dare the government make decisions or limit options for terminally ill people like me,” Maynard said in the video, speaking in a calm, steady tone.

“Unfortunately, California law prevented me from getting the end of life option I deserved,” she said. “No one should have to leave their home and community for peace of mind, to escape suffering and to plan for a gentle death.”

Wolk and other sponsors of the proposed legislation — Democratic state Sen. Bill Monning and Democratic Assemblywoman Susan Talamantes Eggman — released the video footage Wednesday morning at a Sacramento news conference.

Speaking to reporters, Maynard’s mother and widower urged lawmakers to back the measure and support Compassion and Choices, an advocacy group that publicized Maynard’s story and is fighting for death with dignity laws in statehouses across the country.

“Life is more than breathing air in and out of your body,” said Ziegler. “The definition of a good life and a good death varies person to person. Californians need the freedom to deal with terminal illness as they determine.”

Maynard’s husband, Dan Diaz, conceded that death with dignity is not the right choice for everyone, but having the choice is vital to preserve fairness and decency for the terminally ill, he said.

“What my wife did on Nov. 1 was by her design,” Diaz said, referring to the date Maynard took life-ending medication and died in her sleep. “She avoided a painful, drawn out process and harmed no one else.”
Had Maynard allowed her brain tumor to run its course, her passing would have been the opposite, she said in the video.

“I want to leave this earth in my home, in the arms of my husband and my parents,” Maynard said in the video. “I cannot change the fact that I am dying, but I am living my final days to the fullest.”

Other terminally ill patients such as Kara Tippetts, a 38-year-old Colorado mother of four, wrote an open letter to Maynard in October urging her not to end her life.

Tippetts wrote that suffering can be “the place where true beauty can be known.” She died this month of breast cancer.

(c)2015 San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.), Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: Vinath Chandar via Flickr

Brittany Maynard, Terminally Ill Advocate For Death Aids, Dies At 29

Brittany Maynard, Terminally Ill Advocate For Death Aids, Dies At 29

By Frank Shyong, Los Angeles Times

A young woman who moved to Oregon to take advantage of the state’s assisted-suicide law took lethal drugs prescribed by a doctor and has died, a spokesman said Sunday.

Brittany Maynard, a terminally ill woman who made headlines when she moved to Oregon so she could legally take her own life, died Saturday after consuming life-ending medication, according to Sean Crowley, spokesman for a nonprofit who worked closely with Maynard’s family.

She passed away in her bedroom surrounded by loved ones in her home in Portland, Ore., according to a release.

Maynard was diagnosed with brain cancer, and in April doctors told her she had six months to live. As her pain got worse and her seizures grew more frequent, Maynard and her family decided to move from California to Oregon, where state law allows terminally ill patients of sound mind to seek medical help to end their life. California has no such law.

Maynard’s family published an obituary on Maynard’s website Sunday evening supporting her decision.

“Brittany chose to make a well-thought-out and informed choice to die with dignity in the face of such a terrible, painful and incurable illness,” the obituary reads.

Five states — Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Montana and New Mexico — have laws that allow terminally ill patients to seek medical aids to death. California considered similar legislation in 2007, but the measure was shelved after it failed to receive enough support to pass.

Maynard, a graduate of UC Berkeley and UC Irvine, went public with her story in October to advocate for wider passage of such laws. She appeared in a feature for People magazine that quickly went viral and sparked a nationwide debate about physician-assisted suicide.

She launched a website, www.theBrittanyFund.org, where she raised money to lobby for the passage of “death with dignity” laws and blogged about her last months of life.

Maynard was an adventurous traveler, according to the release. She climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, taught in orphanages in Nepal and scuba-dived in the Galapagos. She had resolved to visit the Grand Canyon before she died, and a post from Oct. 24 described how headaches, neck pains and eventually a seizure cut the experience short. On Sunday night, a video posted to the website’s home page shows Maynard talking about her decision.

“If Nov. 2 comes along, and I’ve passed, I hope my family is still proud of me and the choices I’ve made,” Maynard says in the video.

AFP Photo

Interested in more national news? Sign up for our daily email newsletter.