Second Act for Effort To Legalize Doctor-Assisted Suicide
Two state legislators on Thursday will reintroduce a measure that would allow terminally ill patients to obtain life-ending prescription drugs, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Assembly members Lloyd Levine (D-Van Nuys) and Patty Berg (D-Santa Rosa) co-authored similar legislation last year that was passed in the Assembly but defeated by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The measure was modeled after an Oregon law.
The lawmakers' press secretaries said the reintroduced bill will be almost identical to the defeated measure (San Francisco Chronicle, 2/12).
The avoidance of the term "suicide" in the legislation to be reintroduced this week is an "implicit acknowledgment of the stigma attached to the 'S-word'," Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at UC Berkeley's School of Information, writes in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece. "Even if the media wind up sticking with 'assisted suicide,' the terminology controversies are bound to change the way people think about the issue," according to Nunberg (Nunberg, Los Angeles Times, 2/12).
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