SACRAMENTO, California - August 29, 2008 - Just as Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama was in Denver preaching to a crowd of thousands of fans about the "change" he wants to see in the United States, his party compatriots in the California legislature were making their own change, by approving a controversial plan that would allow nurses to assist terminally ill patients with suicide.

“AB 2747 allows a physician assistant or a nurse to opine that a patient is 'terminal,' and then push for unnatural death by 'palliative sedation,'” said Randy Thomasson, chief of the Campaign for Children and Families, shortly after the vote.

"Depressed patients who succumb to this pressure will be drugged unconscious and die from dehydration, usually within five to 10 days. Nothing in the bill prohibits this horror," he said.

Forty-two Democrats in California voted in favor of the plan: 30 Republicans and two Democrats opposed the plan.

"AB 2747 pushes suicide through the back door at the hands of non-physicians taking advantage of depressed patients," Thomasson said. His organization has been alerting Californians to raise their concerns about the plan for sudden death with floor alerts, phone calls and e-mails.

"AB 2747 cheapens the value of human life by endorsing suicide as an option. Gov. Schwarzenegger should pledge to veto this very dangerous bill," Thomasson said, describing how the author, Assemblywoman Pattie Berg of Eureka, "deceptively changed" the bill to appear that "voluntarily stopping of eating and drinking" and "palliative sedation" no longer were on a list of "symptom management" options.

But the final bill "is broad enough to easily include these suicide techniques," Thomasson said.

The specific references to those treatments simply were changed to "other clinical treatments useful when a patient is actively dying."

According to the CCF report, Assemblyman Van Tran of Costa Mesa warned the bill has no protections for patients "who could be mistakenly diagnosed as 'terminally ill' but would have many, many full years of life ahead."