Opposition to an Assembly bill that would make it easier to pull the plug on incapacitated, terminally ill patients is moving to the left from the right side of the aisle.

The Family Health Care Decision Act would establish a mechanism to appoint surrogate decision-makers for incapacitated patients who did not appoint a proxy themselves. The bill has languished since Assembly Member Richard Gottfried introduced it in 1993, largely as a result of opposition from the New York State Catholic Conference, the policy wing of the Roman Catholic Church in the state, and the Republican-controlled state Senate.

Now, changes to the bill’s language have convinced the Catholic Conference and various state senators to drop their opposition to it, while alienating more liberal members of the Assembly. Mr. Gottfried said he was optimistic that the bill would pass last June, though opposition in the Assembly caused the vote to be delayed.

“After so many years of the opposite being true, this time the Assembly held it up,” Mr. Gottfried told The New York Sun.

Several revisions in the bill changed the composition of its support.

The first was the addition of the requirement that in the case of pregnant patients, the surrogate must consider “the impact of treatment decisions of the fetus and on the course and outcome of the pregnancy.”

That and the addition of language that requires “consideration of the dignity and uniqueness of every person” and “sets forth the right of private hospitals and individual health care providers to refuse, on grounds of moral or religious conscience, to honor health care decisions,” caused the Catholic Conference to drop its opposition, according to a spokesman, Dennis Poust.

The removal of language that established a hierarchy of relatives to decide a surrogate – and considered domestic partners equal to spouses – convinced the senate Republican majority to allow the bill to pass, Mr. Gottfried said.

The majority leader of the senate, Joseph Bruno, and the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, Kemp Hannon, whom Mr. Gottfried said he was primarily negotiating, could not be reached for comment yesterday evening. The majority leader of the senate, Joseph Bruno, was not available for comment.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a religious official familiar with the bill said the changes regarding pregnant patients and the hierarchy of relatives had sparked opposition among left-leaning Assembly members, in particular Deborah Glick and Daniel O’Donnell.

Mr. Gottfried confirmed that those changes have caused Ms. Glick and Mr. O’Donnell to become the bill’s most vocal opposition in the Assembly, and he said others agreed with them.

Ms. Glick said “opposition” was a “somewhat strange characterization” of her position. She said the last minute changes to the bill had raised procedural questions that many of her colleagues wanted addressed, as well as questions regarding the substance of the bill.

Mr. Gottfried said the changes were made earlier but distributed to some Assembly members at the last minute, which he regretted.

Mr. O’Donnell could not be reached for comment yesterday evening.

Conservative opposition to the bill has not vanished, however.

Agudath Israel in America, a branch of the international organization of chasidic and Orthodox Jewish groups, opposes the legislation, its executive vice president for government and public affairs, Rabbi David Zwiebel, testified last week before the Assembly’s Health Committee.

“The proposed legislation … expands significantly a third party’s authority to refuse life-sustaining treatment on behalf of an incapacitated patient. We regard this as an unwise – indeed, an extremely dangerous – expansion. … The potential for abuse of that awesome decision-making authority is self-evident,” he said. “Under the proposed legislation, that failure may result in the patient’s death, perhaps even by starvation and dehydration. As we all recognize, there is no recourse for mistakes of that nature.”

“It is better to err on the side of life,” he told the Sun.

Mr. Gottfried, who said he hoped the bill would become law in the last legislative session, said he was cautiously optimistic that it would pass next year.