The Magazine

"KILL THE BILL, NOT THE ILL";

A Report from the Front Lines of the Assisted-Suicide Fight in California

Jun 21, 1999, Vol. 4, No. 38 • By WESLEY J. SMITH
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Sacramento, California


It was every liberal's dream of diverse, grass-roots political activism: more than a hundred people demonstrating angrily in front of the California state capitol against pending legislation that threatened people who are poor, who are disabled, and who are vulnerable. Disability-rights activists in wheel-chairs marched in solidarity with white medical professionals, alongside African-American clergy and advocates for the poor, next to Latino migrant farm workers and Catholics praying the rosary.


Some liberals, however, were displeased by this show of diversity. For Democratic assembly-women Dion Aroner of Berkeley and Sheila Kuehl of Santa Monica, for example, the protest was only the latest frustration. Aroner is the author of AB 1592, a bill to legalize physician-assisted suicide, and Kuehl is a leading supporter. Conventional wisdom had held that the bill would move swiftly and easily through the committee process and onto the assembly floor for quick approval. But the grass-roots coalition that had sprung up to oppose it had slowed the bill's progress to a crawl.

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