Sen. Lois Wolk to introduce right-to-die legislation in Sacramento (w/video)

A North Coast lawmaker is renewing efforts to give California’s terminally ill more say over when and how they die in the wake of a Bay Area woman’s timed death to relieve her suffering from brain cancer.

There have been numerous failed attempts to give doctors in California the legal authority to prescribe a lethal dose of medications to terminally ill patients. That includes several bills co-authored by former North Coast lawmaker Patty Berg.

Brittany Maynard’s highly publicized death in Oregon late last year has renewed hope in advocates that this time will be different. The legislation is being proposed by Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, and Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel.

Wolk on Tuesday said Maynard’s death “galvanized the lawmakers to take action.”

“Her courage, her willingness to open herself up to the world and share with them the excruciating final days of her life is really an important factor for both Sen. Monning and me,” said Wolk, whose district includes Petaluma, Rohnert Park, Cotati and Sonoma.

Maynard, a UC Berkeley graduate who was diagnosed with aggressive terminal brain cancer shortly after she was married in Sonoma Valley, relocated to Portland so that she could take advantage of Oregon’s groundbreaking Death with Dignity law. Maynard ended her life in November by taking a fatal dose of prescription medicine. She was 29.

Maynard’s widower, Dan Diaz, and mother Debbie Ziegler will be present at the state Capitol today when lawmakers unveil the “End of Life Option Act.”

The legislation, which is backed by the North Coast’s other senator, Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, would require two physicians to determine that a person has only six months to live and that the patient has the mental competency to request that their life be ended. The attending physician must discuss alternatives with the patient, including palliative or hospice care. The patient must self-administer the lethal drugs.

The law mirrors Oregon’s with a few exceptions, including that pharmacists, as well as physicians, are given legal immunity for participating in the deaths.

Since the Oregon law went into effect in 1997, 1,173 people have requested prescriptions and 752 ingested the drugs to end their lives, according to the Oregon Health Authority. Cancer is the leading underlying illness prompting people to make the decision to end their lives. The three most frequently mentioned end-of-life concerns have been loss of autonomy, decreasing ability to participate in activities that made life enjoyable and loss of a person’s dignity, according to the Oregon agency.

Carole Van Aelstyn, a retired Santa Rosa hospice nurse and volunteer for Compassion and Choices, said people deserve that choice.

“It’s a basic human right to make choices about my body, just like abortion,” she said.

Compassion and Choices, which has helped organize support for the proposed bill in California, consults with people who are terminally ill.

Van Aelstyn said she worked with a 91-year-old Graton man last week who decided to end his life because of the pain he was suffering related to severe rheumatoid arthritis. The man died after a five-day fast.

Van Aelstyn said such “passive” ways of dying are less preferable to the direct method of administering medications.

“It’s a hard job to fast for 10 days if you’re not used to that,” she said. “If you have medications that can end it, why not? I would do it.”

Oregon, Vermont and Washington allow physician-aided death for the terminally ill, and lawmakers in 13 states, including California, are working on similar legislation, according to Compassion and Choices.

Some religious organizations are opposed on the grounds that hastening one’s death violates God’s will and other spiritual commandments against homicide. Health care providers also are divided.

The California Medical Association “condemns voluntary active euthanasia as unethical and unacceptable.” The organization joined forces with the Catholic Church in 1992 to defeat a ballot initiative that would have made California the first state in the nation to legalize physician-assisted death.

“I feel the driver behind the interest in this is the lack of appropriate care for people living with serious illness,” said Susan Keller, who heads a Sonoma County-based program dedicated to end-of-life issues.

Her focus has been on the expansion of access to palliative care, which involves doctors, nurses, and other professional medical caregivers providing treatment to a person whether he or she is terminally ill or not.

“We’ve worked tirelessly to push palliative care into the mainstream, and that model is now working,” Keller said.

Gary Johanson, a Santa Rosa physician who specializes in palliative and hospice care, said he’s not against the “principle” of physician-assisted death in cases where treatment options have been exhausted and a person is in unrelenting pain.

“In situations of intractable suffering, we shouldn’t stand by idly and say, ‘Tough,’” he said.

But he said “palliative sedation,” in which a person can be rendered unconscious, effectively relieves suffering while also avoiding the moral and ethical conflicts inherent in choosing one’s own death. He said it’s also safer than a person self-administering drugs for that purpose.

“Less guilt. Less mistakes,” he said.

Still, he said most physicians support having the option of prescribing lethal medications to patients. Wolk’s office cited opinion polls showing a strong majority of Californians also support the concept.

Wolk said her bill does not conflict with palliative care. The senator co-authored a bill signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last year that requires the Department of Health Care Services to establish standards and provide technical assistance to help Medi-Cal managed care plans provide palliative care services to patients of any age and stage of serious illness.

“We see it (physician-assisted death) as another option in the continuum of end-of-life choices that people make,” she said. “We do not see us in opposition to palliative care. Not at all.”

You can reach Staff Writer Derek Moore at 521-5336 or derek.moore@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @deadlinederek.