CIENCIASMEDICASNEWS: What will happen to California’s assisted suicide law?

domingo, 3 de junio de 2018

What will happen to California’s assisted suicide law?

What will happen to California’s assisted suicide law?
Bioedge

What will happen to California’s assisted suicide law?

by Xavier Symons | 2 Jun 2018 | 1 comment

Last month BioEdge reported on the decision by a California county court judge to overturn the state’s assisted suicide law. Since then, state Attorney General Xavier Becerra filed an appeal to the county court, and asked the 4th District Court of Appeal to allow the law to stay in place while the “appeals process” took place. But the district court refused, and on Friday Riverside County Superior Court judge Daniel A. Ottolia issued a formal judgement that deemed the law to be “unconstitutional”. Legal experts say that this means the law has been overturned -- for now.

“Until and unless the law is reinstated by action of the court of appeal or California Supreme Court, it has been ruled unconstitutional and is therefore void,” Stephen Larson, an attorney for the group suing to invalidate the law, said in an email to The Los Angeles Times.

Becerra is expected to file appeal to a higher court, but he is yet to do so.

Experts say that it is unlikely that the decision will affect assisted suicide in California in the long term. Even if the appeals court upholds Ottolia’s decision, the state Legislature could pass a similar law, perhaps with additional safeguards. The law has strong support in the Legislature and among the public. A 2015 survey conducted by UC Berkeley found that 76% of Californians supported allowing terminally ill patients to take their own lives.

“I’d be surprised if the law doesn’t stand in the long term,” Nelson told The Times.

Saturday, June 2, 2018

Some years ago, I received an unexpected phone call from a Melbourne magazine which described itself as the voice of the Australian Left. One of the editors wanted me to write an article about euthanasia activist Philip Nitschke. “He’s ****ing the proletariat over, comrade,” was his interpretation of Dr Nitschke’s mission. I obliged and was later rewarded with an invitation to the magazine’s Christmas party. I had an interesting chat there with an enthusiastic fan of Stalin’s philosophical works (“much misunderstood”), thus dispelling any misgivings I might have had about the magazine’s left-wing credentials.
Nowadays, “left-wing” almost certainly indicates support for euthanasia. That’s why I was gratified to read that the defeat of a euthanasia bill in Portugal last week was due to the opposition of the Communist Party. Its leader, João Oliveira, told the Portuguese parliament that:

“Faced with the problems of human suffering, illness, disability or incapacity, the solution is not to remove responsibility from society by promoting the early death of people in these circumstances, but to promote social progress in order to ensure conditions for a decent life.”

That’s what I thought left-wing politics was all about: protecting the disadvantaged. Have left-wingers in the Anglosphere lost their way?