California Governor Jerry Brown, who was fully informed about the dangers legal assisted suicide presents to literally everybody, rich or poor, abled or disabled, sick or well, young or old, nevertheless signed the state’s assisted suicide bill into law today, saying he did it because he did not think it right to “make it a crime for a dying person to end his life”.
Brown ignored the fact that the bill is not about criminalizing suicide but about lifting the penalties for assisting in suicide, thereby getting medical people, the state, and everyone around a patient involved and creating numerous opportunities for error and abuse, including murder pure and simple, without fear of discovery or punishment.
As a state senator who voted against the bill said, “Let’s call this for what it really is: It’s not death with dignity. This is state-assisted death, physician-assisted death and relative-assisted death.”
Here’s a link to the story in the Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/local/political/la-me-pc-gov-brown-end-of-life-bill-20151005-story.html.
Brown will have to live with his conscience. We, on the other hand, can be proud and thankful that we had and took the opportunity to fight this with all our hearts. We especially thank those who have worked tirelessly for years, people like the brilliant and tireless Margaret Dore and like John Kelly and all the people from Not Dead Yet, who have never stopped pointing out the loathing of disability that lies behind legal assisted suicide and that makes it deadly for them. There are so many others.
Compassion and Choices’ Barbara Coombs Lee is bragging that 1 in 10 people in the US now lives in a state with legal assisted suicide.
Now is not the time to turn back. We must continue to fight the expansion of assisted suicide and its twin, euthanasia, in the US and the world. We must be tireless in bringing abuse and error to light so that we can repeal the laws that already exist.
True Dignity believes that the time has arrived for us also to begin to form networks of individuals who agree to advocate for each other against the pressures and coercion that no doubt are already leading and certainly will lead to premature and unwanted deaths enabled by these laws.
We are sad, even devastated, today. Tomorrow our unrelenting opposition efforts will continue. There is solace in that.