California could soon have the most expansive assisted suicide law in the nation, allowing out-of-state residents to participate in its state program.
State Sen. Catherine Blakespear introduced in February Senate Bill 1196—which would modify the state’s current End of Life Option Act—to allow nonresidents to end their lives in California with a drug given intravenously for a range of conditions, including mental illness.
If passed, the legislation would expand the state’s existing assisted suicide law by removing the terminal illness requirement and allowing anyone—even nonresidents—with a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” to participate in the program.
Ms. Blakespear said the intention behind the revision to the legislation is to allow more independence for those who seek to end their lives.
“Nearing your end-of-life elicits strong emotions and is a human experience we will all inevitably encounter,” the senator said in a statement provided to The Epoch Times. “The intention behind the End of Life Option Act is to provide those nearing their end-of-life with medical autonomy that best suits their needs—not mine or yours, but their specific needs during this personal moment.”
She said no person should have to suffer as they near the end of their lives and that the bill would offer them a choice but did not provide a comment by press time regarding her bill’s expansion of the act specifically.
Existing state law allows California residents who have been diagnosed with terminal diseases to make a request for an aid-in-dying drug to end their lives.
SB 1196 would toss out the residency requirement, allowing out-of-state residents or immigrants to receive the suicide drug, remove the requirement for a patient to make two verbal requests for the drug within 48 hours, and expand assisted suicide to those with early- to mid-stage dementia, who currently must wait until they have six months left to live before applying for the suicide drug.
“People with dementia and other progressive neurological conditions will likely lose the required cognitive capacity to obtain and the physical capacity to ingest aid-in-dying medication well before they have only six months of life expectancy,” Ms. Blakespear said in a fact sheet about SB 1196.
The legislation would replace the “terminal disease” requirement and allow “grievous and irremediable medical conditions” to qualify. This means the patient would only be required to have a serious and incurable illness or disease, be experiencing an irreversible decline in capability, enduring physical or psychological suffering, or be in a medical state that is “intolerable to the individual and cannot be relieved in a manner the individual deems acceptable.”
Ms. Blakespear’s bill would also allow for intravenous infusion. Drugs must be taken orally by the patient now.
Greg Burt of the California Family Council, an advocacy organization focused on religious liberty and pro-family policies, said the proposed legislation was expected.
“We knew this would happen,” Mr. Burt said on the organization’s website on March 18. “Once the state legalized helping people kill themselves, the activists would then push and push to make the suicide drugs available to more and more people.”
California’s End of Life Option Act has been controversial since it passed in 2015 and was implemented a year later. The state was the fifth in the nation to legalize assisted suicide.
Since then, deaths by assisted suicide have risen each year—starting with 151 in 2016 and increasing steadily each year through 2022 when there were 853, according to a 2023 report by the California Public Health Department using data through 2022.
In total, from 2016 to 2022, 3,349 people have died using medications prescribed under the law. Of those, 90 percent were in hospice or end-of-life care, the state health department reported.
The state was sued by several groups last year over the law, claiming that it violated federal laws, including disability rights and the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment.
In May 2023, Christian Medical and Dental Associations, a nonprofit with more than 13,000 current health care professionals as members, sued the state, saying the law violated physicians’ First Amendment rights. The lawsuit was filed after changes in the law required doctors to document a patient’s request for suicide, even if that physician declined to participate and prescribe the lethal medications.
A settlement was reached in the lawsuit, allowing the law to remain in place, but the state agreed to not enforce the documentation requirement.
Disability rights groups, including the Institute for Patients’ Rights and Not Dead Yet, both based in New York, filed another lawsuit in April 2023 against state officials, saying, in part, that the law allows people with a disability to possibly be coerced into assisted suicide. The suit has not yet been heard.
Matt Vallière, executive director of the Patients’ Rights Action Fund and Institute for Patients’ Rights, said the law creates unequal treatment for those who are disabled.
“California law creates even more unequal treatment for people with disabilities, puts us at greater risk of coercion, and makes us more vulnerable to a system preventing access to the care we need,” Mr. Vallière said in an opinion article in The Hill in January. “It effectively funnels us toward death too soon. That’s not equal protection—it’s eugenics.”
