On Tuesday, a judge in California’s Riverside County overturned the state’s physician-assisted suicide law. The state attorney general has five days to file an appeal to keep the law in place. After much controversy, California’s law was enacted in 2015, the fifth state to do so.
Given California’s tendency toward progressive legislation, this ruling is surprising. Superior Court Judge Daniel A. Ottolia overturned the suicide law because the California legislature violated the law by passing the End of Life Option Act during a special session dedicated to healthcare issues (essentially on process grounds). While this would typically be good news for pro-life groups, Attorney General Xavier Becerra will weigh in officially soon. Unofficially, at least, in a statement to the Los Angeles Times, he was unhappy with Ottolia’s ruling. “We strongly disagree with this ruling and the state is seeking expedited review in the Court of Appeal,” he said.
Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, had signed into law the End of Life Option Act, which allows terminally ill patients to request lethal medications from their doctors, following the relocation and physician-assisted suicide of Brittany Maynard. Maynard was 29 years old when she had to move from California to Oregon to utilize their legalized suicide laws and ended her life. Maynard had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.
While Hawaii recently became the seventh state to follow suit and pass similar physician-suicide laws as California, the general public seems to support the policy. According to a Gallup poll last June, 73 percent of Americans say “a doctor should be allowed to end a terminally ill patient’s life by painless means if the patient requests it,” and Californians, specifically, are highly in favor of their law. When Brown passed it, 65 percent supported the law across party lines.
Even still, California’s law, however popular among the public, has not proved to be quite as popular practically speaking. A report in the San Diego Union-Tribune said because the law did not require any medical provider or facility to help a patient die, medical facilities and pharmacies (which would be prescribing the appropriate lethal medications) were slow to get involved in the process. In 2016, only 111 people took advantage of California’s law.
The old adage “all politics is local” certainly comes into play here, almost as much as the contents of the law and the ruling themselves: While pro-life groups initiated the lawsuit as a way to target the flaw that would work in their favor, essentially eradicating the ruling, it’s worth noting Ottolia was appointed by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and Becerra is quite liberal. Becerra, of course, is the respondent in the now-infamous case which the Supreme Court recently heard about whether California can compel pro-life pregnancy clinics to advertise for abortion or not. He’s also suing the Little Sisters of the Poor, trying to compel them to provide birth control.
It’s very likely, given Becerra’s progressive leanings, that he will appeal. But reading between the lines, it appears California’s right-to-die law is similar to a lot of California’s legislation: A means through which target groups make political points that don’t necessarily reflect or appeal to California’s culture at large, however liberal they might seem.
Unfortunately for desperate citizens of California, this could ultimately be harmful to them. Time will tell if the judge’s ruling will stand.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
