September 23, 2021
Via Email leg.unit@gov.ca.gov
The Honorable Gavin Newsom
Governor of the State of California
State Capitol
Sacramento, CA 95814
RE: Urging Veto of SB 380
Dear Governor Newsom:
The purpose of this letter is to urge you to veto SB 380. If signed, SB 380 would eliminate critical protections contained in California’s End of Life Options Act or, to be more specific, its assisted suicide law.
Not Dead Yet is a national disability rights group that opposes legalization of assisted suicide as a deadly form of discrimination. These laws deny people with advanced illnesses, who are virtually always disabled, suicide prevention services on an equal basis to others. They also grant broad legal immunities to people involved in an individual’s death without meaningful protections against coercion or wrongdoing.
Only a few years after the original law’s passage, SB 380 would drastically shorten the waiting period between an individual’s requests for physician-assisted suicide to 48 hours rather than 15 days. This new law would also end the requirement that the individual make a final attestation affirming their choice before administering the drug. Especially in light of the fact that no independent witness is required to confirm that lethal drugs were administered by the individual rather than another person, these requirements are essential protections against coercion and abuse. They should not be removed.
Not Dead Yet also supports the letters urging you to veto SB 380 submitted by the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund (DREDF) and Disability Rights California (DRC).
We urge you to review the research cited by DREDF, leading to the following conclusion:
[T]he existing requirements of a sufficient period of time between requests, together with a final attestation, are necessary to protect against miscommunication (particularly between a physician and a patient from a different cultural background from the physician), coercion, a failure to offer and provide alternative supports to assisted suicide, and the undue influence of ableism. Two days is far too short. Moreover, eliminating the final attestation is completely contrary to the purportedly shared value among proponents and opponents of informed choice.
Both DREDF and DRC also share NDY’s concerns about the medical ableism that the pandemic has revealed. As DRC put it:
Assisted suicide is not about choice when people with disabilities lack access to sufficient medical care. The COVID-19 Pandemic revealed long standing disparities in our health care delivery system as we witnessed disproportionate rates of infection and mortality in our aging and disability community as well as our Black and Latinx communities. Now more than ever we should be focused on addressing inequities in our health care delivery system, not expanding access to assisted suicide.
We also encourage you to pay attention to an op-ed (Keep the Safeguards in California’s ‘End of Life’ law) published in Capitol Weekly concerning SB 380 by DREDF’s Marilyn Golden, an internationally prominent disability advocate who tragically passed away this week. She said:
This rush to erode the safeguards included in the 2015 End of Life Option Act is dangerous public policy. There is simply no data or science to support removing them so soon. . . . [W]ith the benefit of hindsight, it appears that the protections proponents touted as safeguards were no more than a ruse to get the original law passed.
Please veto SB 380.
Sincerely,
Diane Coleman, JD
President & CEO