Doctor-assisted dying will be legal in California from June 9th

CALIFORNIA’S lawmakers are moving slowly to implement a bill legalising doctor-assisted dying. Fair enough. The Economist supports the right of the terminally ill to die when and how they choose, and with the support of clinicians (you can read last year’s cover leader on the subject here). However, the issue is difficult, and drawing up checks and balances is vital, so it is worth taking the time to get them right.

Even so, for residents of the most populous American state who are terminally ill and want a doctor’s help to cut short their suffering, the wait has been protracted. In October 2015 California’s governor, Jerry Brown, said he would not veto a bill that state lawmakers had passed the previous month. In a short open letter he said that he put the right of Californians to decide according to their own consciences ahead of his own religious beliefs (Mr Brown is a Catholic). Yet that was not the end of the story. Mr Brown supported the bill via a special legislative session called to discuss (among other things) how the state should pay for doctor-assisted dying. His assent meant little until that session ended; 90 days after it adjourned, California’s proposal would come into effect.

The extraordinary legal session ended on March 10th; doctor-assisted dying will thus be allowed in California from June 9th. (With strict safeguards: two doctors must agree that a patient has less than six months to live, and the patient must have undergone rigorous questioning to make sure that he or she is of sound mind and really wants to die.) Things are moving quicker now that date has been set: on March 30th the state’s senate health committee voted to pass a bill on to the senate’s appropriations committee that would establish a free telephone helpline providing information to those considering taking their lives with the support of physicians.

Sceptics fear that California’s new law will prompt a rush of medically assisted suicides. That is unlikely: in Oregon, which has had a very similar law since 1997, fewer than a thousand people have used it to take their own lives. California is ten times as populous as Oregon, but its Department of Health Care Services predicts that in the first year fewer than 450 seriously ill individuals will ask the state’s Medicaid programme for a prescription of lethal drugs. And not all will take the pills they are prescribed.

For some Californians, the fact that there is a date from which people can choose to take their own lives with the help of medical professionals is deeply troubling. Around one in five people in the Pacific region of the United States polled by Ipsos Mori for The Economist last year said doctor-assisted dying should not be allowed. Some of them will be counting down the days with dread. But more—seven in ten in the same poll—supported the right. For a handful who are terminally ill, June 9th cannot come soon enough.