Patti Berg: Calling It as it Isn’t

For years, California Assemblywoman Patti Berg (D- Mill Valley) has resorted to every conceivable maneuver she could think of to pass an assisted suicide bill through the California Legislature. She failed. So now, she is trying a different approach: Under the guise of requiring doctors to disclose “information” about “options” available to the “terminally ill,” with AB 2747, which I wrote about here (before amendments) and here, she is undermining proper understandings of legitimate medical treatments such as palliative sedation, and attempting to turn it into a form of death on demand.

She’s having trouble with this one too and in response, has now penned an “I’m so courageous and my opponents are just death-denying squeamish nervous Nellies who can’t handle the truth,” kind of column. She writes:

I’m not someone who speaks in euphemisms, either. When I talk about taxes, I talk about taxes. When I talk about sex, I talk about sex. And when I talk about death, I talk about death—I don’t couch real ideas behind fuzzy comfort phrases like “passing on,” “going to sleep” or “ceasing to be.”

I almost swallowed my Adam’s apple when I read that one. I have had to deal with Berg’s advocacy for years, and she is the master of using gooey euphemisms when it comes to assisted suicide. For example,I debated her in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle, and she called assisted suicide “a gentle, voluntary and peaceful choice.” Yea, that’s straight talk alright. And how about the title of her assisted suicide legalization bill: “The California Compassionate Choices Act.” Move over John McCain: Berg is has taken over the steering wheel of the Straight Talk Express!

And how about this nonsense:

In the real world, death is most often a process, predictable and inevitable. Terminal diseases move through phases. Death comes. It is often very cruel. The agony of cancer does not make for pleasant conversation.

Except, when you have defined terminal illness as one year to live—as AB 2747 does—it is not at all predictable. My first hospice patient that I served as a volunteer got kicked out because he improved to the point he wasn’t dying. My last patient, a man with ALS, was supposed to die in 6 months and lasted nearly 2 years. A friend of mine was given 3 months to live with lung cancer—more than 7 years ago! I am sure you all have similar stories. Contrary to Berg, we usually don’t die by the numbers until we get very close to the end.

And indeed, while cancer is certainly not pleasant to discuss, the pain it causes is almost always amenable to palliation—to the point that when Dame Cecily Saunders, the founder of the modern hospice movement, was once asked by the New York Times how she wanted to die, she said cancer! This even nonplussed me, but she had an interesting reason: She knew her suffering could be controlled and it would give her time to say goodbye to her friends. (Saunders got her wish. She died of cancer in her own hospice, Here is the obituary that I wrote about her for the Weekly Standard.)

The “courageous truth teller” Berg’s problem is that we understand her all too well. She has an ideologue’s zeal for assisted suicide. That is her right. But pretending that our side hasn’t the stomach to talk frankly about death is ludicrous. Indeed, getting her side to talk plainly about what they propose and its consequences is the primary problem.