Assisted Suicide Surges in California – The American Spectator

Despite attempts by California’s disability rights groups, religious groups, and pro-life health care workers to provide patient protections from the power of the burgeoning assisted suicide industry in the state, there was a 63 percent increase in the number of assisted suicide deaths last year, and a 47 percent increase in the number of prescriptions for lethal drugs prescribed by physicians.

Data released in July, 2023 by the California Department of Public Health revealed that 853 individuals in California died from physician assisted suicide in the state in 2022; this is compared with 522 individuals who chose to die similarly in 2021. Since the End of Life Option Act (EOLA) came into effect on June 9, 2016, California physicians have written a total of 5,168 deadly prescriptions for individuals under EOLA and 3,349 individuals — 64.8 percent — have died from ingesting the lethal cocktail of a cardiotonic, opioid, and sedative that doctors prescribed for them.

And although we are supposed to be reassured that “safeguards” remain, the truth is that the likely reason for the increase in assisted suicide deaths in 2022 is because in 2021 California legislators expanded the assisted suicide law by passing SB 380 which “eliminated the requirement that an individual who is prescribed and ingests aid in dying medication make a final attestation,” and forced doctors who oppose assisted suicide to refer the person who requested assisted suicide to a provider who is willing to help them end their lives. This makes pro-life doctors and health care workers complicit in physician assisted suicide. They also eliminated the original law’s sunset clause which eliminated the requirement to review the law.

Most egregiously, SB 380 targets California hospice programs which do not participate in the physician assisted suicide program at their facilities.  Using the same kind of language that has been used against crisis pregnancy centers which help pregnant women keep their children instead of aborting them, SB 380 claims that hospice programs are using “deceptive language” when they advertise their end-of-life services.  To expose and punish these “pro-life” hospice providers, SB 380 “prohibits a health care provider or health care entity from engaging in false, misleading, or deceptive practices relating to their willingness to qualify an individual or provide a prescription for an aid in dying medication to a qualified individual.  The bill would require a health care entity to post its current policy regarding medical aid in dying on its internet website.” (READ MORE: Did Gavin Newsom Kill His Own Mother?)

The parallels to the pro-abortion rhetoric are striking.  And not surprisingly, there are the usual lobbyists and the legislators who benefit from the largesse of the assisted suicide industry who are ready and willing to help expand access to physician assisted suicide.  Compassion and Choices — once known as the Hemlock Society — is still the largest assisted suicide advocacy organization in the country and in some ways, mirrors Planned Parenthood in its lobbying efforts and creative media presence. Portrayed as the kinder, gentler approach to dying, Compassion and Choices is attempting to change hearts and minds on the benefits of choosing a death of one’s own.  Compassion and Choices has promoted the idea of the role of the “end of life doula” who helps to guide patients toward death in the same way that a birth doula guides patients toward childbirth.

With their own slick marketing materials, the most recent summer 2023 issue of their beautifully produced magazine contains an article on “The Death Positivity Movement.” The summer issue also includes a worrisome article on how emergency departments of hospitals should be viewed as the “frontline” in Compassion and Choices’ latest initiative called the Emergency and Palliative Medicine Initiative.  The program brings together healthcare workers and “end of life doulas and caregivers.”

According to Dr. Satheesh Gunaga, vice chair of emergency medicine at l in Michigan and a member of the Compassion and Choices Board of Directors:

If the ED is to continue to be the primary portal of hospital entry for patients requiring emergency care for acute and chronic terminal illnesses then it should also be equally prepared to provide the earliest access to palliative care and advance care planning resources for patients and families who may want and benefit from these services.

It may be somewhat disconcerting for patients checking into the Emergency Department at Henry Ford Wyandotte Hospital to know that the vice chair of their emergency department serves on the board of the largest assisted suicide advocacy organization in the country.

But Compassion and Choices has become so mainstream that most people do not recall the scandals associated with the Hemlock Society and its scandal-ridden founder Derek Humphrey, who helped his first wife commit suicide and then left his second wife once she was diagnosed with cancer.  (RELATED: The Canadian Government Is Euthanizing People Who Have Nothing Wrong With Them)

Today, a number of foundations have given grants to the death-driven organization — including most notably George Soros and his Open Society and his “Project on Death in America” which has donated millions of dollars to promote suicide.  A strong supporter of assisted suicide he once published a personal essay titled “Reflections on Death in America” in which he disclosed that he admired his mother for having joined the Hemlock Society.  Soros approvingly claimed that his mother “had at her hand the means of doing away with herself.”

Other notable institutional supporters of Compassion and Choices include the Kohlberg Foundation, the Katie McGrath and J. J. Abrams Family Foundation and the Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Foundation.   Much of this money has gone into marketing and establishing a strong and positive media presence.

PBS has been a big player in all of this.  In fact, for more than two decades, PBS has been the strongest media partner in promoting assisted suicide through heart-breaking documentaries designed to convince us of the goodness of assisted suicide.  On September 10, 2000, Bill Moyers introduced a four-part PBS series entitled On Our Own Terms: Moyers on Dying, by cautioning viewers that we all must make “hard choices” about our lives and our deaths and that we must “take charge of these decisions.”  On one of the programs entitled “A Death of One’s Own,” suicide is embodied not as a kooky Jack Kevorkian — who helped a man commit suicide on national tv’s 60 Minutes broadcast but by a benevolent Birkenstock-wearing Oregon physician who softly speaks the language of choice as she discusses her state’s right to die law.  The Moyers team reassures us that we too can avoid the loss of control that death might bring if only we make the hard choice of assisted suicide when we need it.

Since 2000, PBS has often presented heart wrenching vignettes of people struggling with terminal illnesses.  Chief among them in 2000, Moyer’s introduced a once-strong veterinarian now debilitated with the degenerative Lou Gehrig’s disease who laments that since he does not live in a state that allows physician assisted suicide he will have to kill himself earlier than he would need to because as his disease progresses he could not commit suicide without help.  Ten years later, PBS brings us yet another individual suffering from ALS in a 2010 documentary called The Suicide Tourist.  In this one, we meet a retired computer science professor with Lou Gehrig’s disease who is “forced” to travel to Switzerland to avail himself of assisted suicide because it is not available to him in his home state.

Now, PBS has moved on from the heart-breaking stories to actually going after hospices which refuse to provide aid in dying to their patients.  In May, 2023, KPBS provided viewers with an investigative expose that revealed that “fewer than 10 hospices” out of the 94 hospices that they investigated were following the law that required all California healthcare entities including hospices to post their policies on medical aid in dying on their websites.  To illustrate the failure of these 84 hospices to warn potential patients that they do not provide physician assistance in dying, KPBS interviewed State Senator Susan Talamantes Eggman (D-Stockton), the co-author of the bill that created the posting requirement. Eggman said “I’m incredibly troubled by that finding … It’s the law that hospices are supposed to post what their policies…