Opponents of assisted suicide were elated June 27 after the state Senate Judiciary Committee rejected a long-dormant bill that would have allowed terminally ill patients to obtain life-ending drugs.

The deciding vote was cast by outgoing Sen. Joseph Dunn, a Santa Ana Democrat who chairs the committee. He said he struggled with how to vote on the bill but ultimately decided he did not want to see the poor and disabled urged to end their lives so hospitals and the medical industry could cut costs.

During a 15-minute speech prior to casting his no vote, Dunn, who is being termed out at the end of the year, said “in this society, more often than not, public policy decisions are driven unfortunately by money concerns, not by policy concerns.”

Supporters of AB 651, co-authored by Assemblywoman Patty Berg, D-Eureka, and Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, D-Van Nuys, after being unable to gather the necessary three votes on the five-member Judiciary Committee, declared defeat on the right-to-die movement in California.

Representatives from a broad coalition of groups opposing the bill, called Californians Against Assisted Suicide, which included the California Catholic Conference and the Alliance for Catholic Healthcare, said the legislation’s defeat should be the end of the debate on physician-assisted suicide in the state.

“We’re very pleased,” said Ned Dolejsi, executive director of the California Catholic Conference in Sacramento. “The testimony from opponents, including a hospice nurse, representatives of disability rights’ groups, and an ethicist from the California Medical Association, provided convincing arguments to defeat this bill.”

Dolejsi called the bill’s rejection by legislators “a wake-up call.”

“What’s truly needed in our state is quality health care coverage for all and quality hospice care. This addresses the wishes of many people, not acceding to the wishes of just a few people,” he said. “All of us in California need now to work hard for the expansion of hospice care and palliative care and to embrace those among us who are dying.”

Among the other organizations aligned with CAAS were the California Medical Association, the California Disability Alliance, the California Foundation for Independent Living Centers, the Western Service Workers Association, the Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals, and the League of United Latin American Citizens.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger never took a position on AB 651. In January he said he would rather see assisted suicide addressed in a voter initiative than in the Legislature.

During an emotionally charged hearing that drew about 120 people to testify, Dunn said he wrestled with his position on the controversial assisted suicide bill. The San Francisco Chronicle reported June 28 that during the past week Dunn consulted with one of Orange County’s Catholic bishops, who opposed the measure, and a UC Davis bioethics expert, who supported it.

Berg contended that Dunn’s fears wouldn’t come true, based upon eight years of experience in Oregon since it became the first state in the nation to allow the practice of physician-assisted suicide.

“There has never been any question among rational people that this practice would be expanded and offered to people who are not dying,” she said.

Susan Penney, an attorney for the California Medical Association, said in testimony that the Oregon law hadn’t been in effect long enough to ensure that it wouldn’t be extended to cover more than the terminally ill.

“It’s entirely premature to argue that there is no slippery slope,” she said.

AB 651 would have allowed a physician to prescribe a self-administered, life-ending drug for an adult who requested it and had been found by two doctors to be mentally competent and within six months of death.

After an earlier version of the bill stalled in the Assembly last year, Berg and Levine amended aid-in-dying provisions into AB 651, which had already passed the Assembly and was awaiting action in the Senate.

The Judiciary Committee vote was 2-2, with Senators Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, and Martha Escutia, D-Norwalk, supporting the measure and Dunn and Sen. Tom Harman, R-Huntington Beach, opposing it. The fifth committee member, Sen. Bill Morrow, R-Oceanside, was absent, but aides said he also opposed the bill.

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