The Christian Medical and Dental Associations (CMDA) has asked the Central District of California U.S. District Court to stop the state’s assisted suicide law because it goes against their “belief in the sanctity of human life.”
The Christian doctors said it is against their conscience to provide lethal drugs to dying patients, the Washington Times reported.
Full-time hospice specialist Dr. Leslee Cochrane says family members pressure mentally ill people to terminate their lives early. He stated that patients “can have very dramatic changes in disposition once their pain is controlled.”
California’s End of Life Options Act legalized assisted suicide for adults diagnosed with terminal illnesses.
It was enacted in 2016.
The law says that doctors who are treating a dying patient “shall ensure the date of a [physician-assisted suicide] request is documented in an individual’s medical record.”
This means that they must give the patient some paperwork needed to get the drugs elsewhere.
Advocates argue that it gives doctors an “out” by referring a patient to another doctor.
Friday’s arguments were the latest in a series of legal challenges to the law.
The first lawsuit, Christian Medical & Dental Associations v. Bonta, was filed in February 2022 in the U.S. District of the Central District of California, according to Alliance Defending Freedom.
A state trial judge deemed the statute illegal in May 2018, but an appeals court reinstated it the following month. The California Supreme Court upheld it.
Under California’s End of Life Option Act, nearly 2,000 people killed themselves by taking lethal drugs between 2016 and 2020, according to The Christian Institute.
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