GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: California judge overturns assisted suicide

domingo, 20 de mayo de 2018

California judge overturns assisted suicide

California judge overturns assisted suicide

Bioedge

California judge overturns assisted suicide

by Xavier Symons | 19 May 2018 |

A California judge has sparked uproar after ruling that the state’s assisted suicide law was unconstitutional.

On Tuesday, Judge Daniel A. Ottolia of the Riverside County Superior Court ruled that the 2015 End of Life Option Act was passed in an unconstitutional manner, and gave the California Attorney General Xavier Becerra five days to file an appeal before the law was invalidated.

Importantly, Judge Ottolia’s decision did not pertain to the content of the Act, but rather to the manner in which was enacted.

Ottolia said that the summer 2015 extraordinary session of the California Legislature in which the bill was enacted was supposed to be limited to matters of health finance; assisted suicide legislation falls outside of the domain of health finance. The scope of the special session was outlined in a Proclamation by California governor Jerry Brown, who later that year signed the bill into law. Assisted suicide is not mentioned in the Proclamation.

Opponents of the End of Life Option Act welcomed the decision.

“We're very satisfied with the court's decision today," said Stephen G. Larson, lead counsel for a group of doctors who sued in 2016 to stop the law. "The act itself was rushed through the special session of the Legislature and it does not have any of the safeguards one would expect to see in a law like this”.

But supporters of the Act were scathing of the decision. Assemblywoman Susan Talamantes Eggman, the Stockton Democrat who carried the bill, said Californians who are in the process of obtaining life-ending drugs through the law have had "the carpet ripped out from under their feet”.

End-of-Life law expert Thaddeus Pope believes that the decision is questionable. Pope wrote in a recent blog post:

...the Governor’s Proclamation mentioned both healthcare finance and healthcare generally. Therefore, pursuant to state supreme court precedent that interprets the special session clause of the constitution, the legislature had the power to enact “any” healthcare related legislation during the special session. It strains credulity to suggest that the End Of Life Option Act, which focuses on regulating physician-patient interactions, does not relate to healthcare.

Attorney General Xavier Becerra said that he strongly disagreed with the ruling, and that he plans to file an appeal.

Sunday, May 20, 2018

Shusaku Endo may be the greatest Japanese novelist who didn’t win the Nobel Prize. He is best known in the West for his novel Silence, about Christianity in 17th Century Japan, which was recently made into a film by Martin Scorsese. But one of his early novels touches upon the ethics of clinical research. Based upon a historical incident which took place just weeks before the end of World War II, The Sea and Poison relates the moral corruption of doctors who vivisected several American prisoners of war.

It’s hard to get, but well worth reading, as it exemplifies the hazards of research on prisoners. Almost no population is more vulnerable to exploitation by clinical researchers than prisoners. Even if they benefit from the research in some tangential way, a more powerful motivation may be their desire to please prison authorities.

Many bioethicists have written about this difficult ethical issue, but this doesn’t make it any easier to make a decision in practice. Below is an article about proposed clinical trial conducted in prisons to determine whether low-salt diets are healthier. What do you think?