Overt assisted suicide being rejected by California’s voters, several groups have now lobbied for, and succeeded in passing, a new “informational” bill requiring counseling on end-of-life options.

While not legalizing assisted-suicide directly, the very broad language in AB 2747 does mandate that physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants provide terminally ill patients with “comprehensive information and counseling regarding legal end-of-life options, as specified,” including “withholding or withdrawal of life-sustaining treatments,”  meaning, in fact, food and water, those most very basic of human necessities.

The state of California already had legislation in place that provided for a patient’s right to medical information at the end of life. So it is with more than a little suspicion that involvement of the groups Compassion & Choice (formerly the Hemlock Society, but in this PC world it has left the negative connotation of poison behind and gone with the more positive euphemism, “compassion”) and Final Exit Network should be viewed. Both groups helped draft the legislation and worked to have it passed in the legislature. And both groups have something to gain, because it is they who will be called in to conduct the end-of-life counseling.

Steve Hopcraft of Compassion & Choice said: “The patient’s right to full information is hard for anyone to quarrel with, except for those extreme religious dogmatists who believe that they should determine what every patient has the right to know, not the patient.”

But of course, it is not about information at all. And it is certainly not about determining what patients have the right to know.

For all those extreme religious dogmatists out there who believe in the sanctity and dignity of human life, and who believe that God who created life should determine when it ends, AB 2747 is about the advancement of euthanasia and the assisted-suicide agenda. The bill will allow either the healthcare providers, and I use that term loosely now, or spokespeople from groups like Compassion & Choice and Final Exit, the opportunity to discuss with patients different “treatment” choices that include starvation and dehydration, and the more common palliative sedation.

Having personally witnessed someone dying from dehydration and having had sneaking suspicions that the final end may have been hurried along by increasing the palliative sedation, I can assure you that it is a horrifying, painful, drawn out, and quite unnatural death.

The California “informational” bill is not a flirtation with euthanasia, but a slippery slope that will easily grease the way for physician-assisted suicide in the very near future. And from a legal perspective, I believe it may also safeguard anyone who participates in assisted suicide from any legal complications.

Governor Schwarzenegger, whose office claimed he was neutral on the issue, signed the bill into law, making him no longer neutral. But then again, Governor Schwarzenegger has done a good job acting the part of the conservative, while actually promoting socialism, and it is in keeping with socialism's belief, broadly stated, that individual rights should be ignored in favor of the group, that his "neutral" support of this measure should be understood. After all, socialism, which denies individual rights in the economic sphere, has not had a very good track record of supporting the ultimate individual right: that to life itself. So it is no surprise that the bill was signed into law under his watch.

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