CCF speaks out against assisted suicide
Jenni Parker, Agape Press
March 3, 2005

A pro-family leader is criticizing a recent Field Poll that claims Californians support a proposed "assisted suicide" bill in the state legislature. Randy Thomasson of Campaign for Children and Families (CCF), a leading West Coast advocacy organization, says the misleading poll is "out of touch with the majority of people who are naturally opposed to hospitals killing patients." He says if those surveyed in the Field Poll had been asked whether they approve of doctors killing patients or whether they feel depressed patients should receive counseling or suicide pills, the responses would have been very different. According to Thomasson, the liberal poll has been touting the popularity of physician-assisted suicide for the last 25 years, but California voters have known better and defeated assisted suicide when it was on the ballot. "People who are ill need support, spiritual care, and counseling if they are depressed and want to end their lives prematurely," the CCF spokesman says, but he contends that legalizing assisted suicide would only "ensure the death of innocent Californians at the hands of an increasingly unscrupulous insurance industry which regards dead people as cheaper to take care of." Thomasson says CCF opposes assisted suicide because it lessens the value of human life and turns doctors and nurses from healers into killers.