Assisted suicide lobby wants to expand assisted suicide laws and promotes death by dehydration.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

A letter from Bob Free, the Board President of the assisted suicide lobby group End of Life Washington sets the agenda and the direction for the group. The letter established two key goals, that being, expanding the Washington state assisted suicide law and promoting legislation that will enable more people to die by dehydration.

In his letter Mr Free states:

As reported to you earlier, the bill to make needed improvements to Washington’s Death with Dignity Act passed the State House of Representatives, with bipartisan support, but failed to make it to the floor of the Senate due to the very crowded legislative session. For the short 60-day session beginning in January 2022, we are determined to pass this important bill. We will be asking you, our supporters, to join Constituent Meetings with your Senator via zoom, to convince them to support HB 1141. The bill’s main objectives are to:

• Reduce the waiting period from 15 days to 72 hours.
• Expand the definition of attending and consulting providers to include Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants. 
• Protect providers working in religiously restricted health systems to provide Death with Dignity outside their regular employment.

Here is a link to my earlier article on HB 1141 (Link).

Mr Free explains why the group wants more death by dehydration. He states:

Committee members have also spent the past year drafting a bill to allow people with serious dementia, including Alzheimer’s, to hasten their death by stopping eating and drinking during the last and worst days of their disease. The bill would incorporate EOLWA’s Instructions for Oral Feeding and Drinking, similar to an advance directive, into Washington’s Natural Death Act. The document expresses a person’s decision about when to be offered food and fluids during late-stage dementia, allowing for a surrogate health care decision maker to ensure caregivers honor a person’s wishes to follow the body’s desire to reduce nourishment and die naturally. We intend to have a bill introduced during the 2022 legislative session, with the support of our legislative champions.

Since the Washington state assisted suicide act requires a person to be competent they want to ensure that people who do not qualify for assisted suicide can die by dehydration. Notice that the group is focusing on people with serious dementia and Alzheimer's.

The "safeguards" that were originally in the Washington State assisted suicide law are now being eliminated. Further to that, the assisted suicide lobby has gone back to promoting death by dehydration because they know that once it becomes more common and people witness the horrific deaths by dehydration, they will demand expanding the law to euthanasia.