Physician-assisted suicide will become legal in California under a bill signed into law today by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, making it the fifth state in the nation to give terminally ill patients a legal right to die.
As hard as it may be to believe in today’s ultra-political culture, my Mom–who was an RN–told me decades ago that there was actually a time when this was not a political issue, but rather a private issue between physicians and patients + spouses, and that as a private issue, so-called physician-assisted suicide, also known as compassion, for mentally competent terminal patients was routine and anything but controversial.