By just two votes, the California State Assembly passed a bill yesterday that detractors say allows doctors to push patients toward medically assisted suicide. The bill, AB 2747, enables doctors to provide a patient declared to have less than one year to live with a long list of end-of-life options, including a last-moments option that looks suspiciously like euthanasia.
Critics of the bill point to a provision that adds "palliative sedation" and VSED (voluntary stopping of eating and drinking) to a patient's end-of-life options, extreme measures that have been previously reserved for patients within a few hours to a few days of death.
If the bill becomes law, critics say, a doctor could pronounce a patient within a year of death, encourage him to consider complete (sometimes irreversible) sedation, then proceed with VSED until the patient, unconscious and unaware, is starved and dehydrated to death. In effect, the critics argue, this is physician-assisted suicide for anyone deemed "within a year of death."
No comments:
Post a Comment