Prescription-assisted suicide bill shelved
It would let doctors supply terminally ill with fatal medicine.
Hotly contested legislation to allow doctors to prescribe fatal medication to terminally ill patients was shelved Thursday in the Assembly.
Assembly Bill 374 lacked enough votes for passage and time was running out, with the Assembly facing a deadline today for acting upon bills by its members.
"The people are there and the politicians aren't," said Will Shuck, chief of staff for Assemblywoman Patty Berg, a Eureka Democrat who helped write the bill.
AB 374 is dead for the year. It could be resurrected in January, Shuck said, but he is not sure whether that will happen.
A similar measure, one of the Legislature's most hotly contested, died in a Senate committee last year.
This year's bill received a boost when Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez signed on as a joint author. But opposition remained intense.
AB 374 is patterned after a similar law in Oregon.
The California measure would allow terminally ill patients with less than three months to live to request and ingest fatal medication after diagnoses by two doctors and compliance with various other conditions.
Supporters describe the proposal as creating a "compassionate choice" for terminally ill patients.
Opponents blast the measure as a devaluation of life and a form of suicide.
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