California Disability Alliance (C D A)

CDA is a statewide, grassroots organization consisting of persons with disabilities and their supporters. Our membership has a broad agenda for promoting the health, independence and full community inclusion of persons with disabilities. Our work has been supported in part by grants from the Disability Rights Advocates Fund of the San Francisco Foundation and the Milbank Foundation for Rehabilitation.

CDA formed in the spring of 1999 in a successful effort to defeat Dion Aroner's "Death with Dignity Act" (California A.B. 1592). People with disabilities (PWDs), their friends, family members and supporters of human rights from up and down the state gathered energy and linked hands with workers groups, hospice associations, disability rights organizations, medical professionals, Catholics, the Berkeley City Council and others to accomplish this task.

Since that time we have worked hard to promote better health care through legislation, by opposing institutionalized care where health care can be provided within the community, and by advocating and alerting the community about changes in health regulations which impact the lives of persons with disabilities. CDA continues to oppose the legalization of assisted suicide and works to improve end-of-life care.

I'm pleased to report that like AB 651/AB 654 (Berg-Levine) of the 2005-06 legislative session, which would have legalized physician-assisted suicide in California, Berg and Levine's effort to revive the bill in the form of AB 374 in 2007-8 also has failed.

Unfortunately, multiple defeats for this misdirected effort haven't convinced the authors that other end-of-life measures are preferable to helping seriously ill patients to end their lives. So this year, they've taken a new and rather insidious approach. In AB 2747, they are attempting to hijack the language of palliative care by defining "palliative sedation" in a way that includes termination of nutrition and hydration. And this, according to their bill, would be available to patients who are expected to live less than a year.

We know that doctors can't predict survival times six months in advance, much less a year. Yet AB 2747 would make terminal sedation available to patients who have been given a diagnosis with an expectation of one year survival or less. Although CDA supports good palliative care and agressive pain management (including sedation that may, but isn't intended to, hasten death, we strongly oppose this misleading bill. The clothing is different, but the wolf remains the same: AB 2747 is just a sneaky way to legalize assisted suicide, and it must be defeated in order to protect the legitimate roles that palliative care, hospice care and truly palliative sedation should play in end-of-life care.

--Laura Remson Mitchell
Legislative Coordinator and Member, Executive Committee
California Disability Alliance

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Last updated 4-26-08.

CDA web site hosted by DisWeb.org