Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.
The 20 states are:
*Arizona, Delaware, *Florida, Illinois, *Indiana, *Iowa, Kentucky, *Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, *Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, *Tennessee, *Virginia and *Wisconsin. The * means that the bill has died.
The good news is that no new state has legalized assisted suicide in the past two years. The bad news it that the assisted suicide lobby is relentless.
The assisted
suicide lobby
claims that no slippery slope exists, yet, in the past few years
existing assisted suicide laws have been expanded by: reducing or
eliminating waiting periods, allowing non-doctors to participate in
assisted suicide, allowing assisted suicide approvals by Tele-health,
expanding the meaning of terminal illness and removing state
residency requirements
Assisted suicide law expansion bills were passed in California (2021), Hawai'i (2023), Oregon (2019, 2023), Vermont (2022, 2023) and Washington State (2023).
In states with an active assisted suicide bill, contact your elected representatives and inform them that in nearly every state assisted suicide law has been expanded since legalization.
There are 4 states that are debating the expansion of assisted suicide in their state.
Colorado assisted suicide expansion bill.
Colorado citizens legalized assisted suicide by approving Proposition 106 in 2016. Proposition 106 was designed to legalize assisted suicide. Now the assisted suicide lobby is expanding the assisted suicide law beyond the "safeguards" contained in Proposition 106.
The assisted suicide lobby knows that it is harder to legalize assisted suicide than to expand it later.
For instance Connecticut opponents of assisted suicide have successfully stopped the legalization of assisted suicide every year, for 11 consecutive years.
Josh Elliott, a three term member of the Connecticut House,
and a sponsor of previous assisted suicide bills was interviewed by Paul
Bass for the New Haven Independent on January 4, 2024. Bass reported:
Elliott has been sponsoring bills for years to allow terminally ill people to take their lives (aka “aid in dying”). The bill finally passed the legislature’s Public Health committee; it got stuck in Judiciary.
The version he plans to resubmit this year has been narrowed to cover terminally ill people with prognoses of less than six months to live, with sign-offs from two doctors and a mental health professional, monthly check-ins, and at least a year of state residence.
“Almost no one” would qualify under that restricted version of the law, Elliott said. But passing it would open the door to evaluation and expansion.
For further clarification Elliott told Bass in the wider interview at 21:30 that:
The bill would be, um, exceptionally narrow in scope, it would be the most narrow in scope bill of this kind were we to pass it. It would be, uh, six months left to live, you have to get sign-offs from multiple doctors—two doctors and one mental health physician—uh, and then you need to go for frequent check ins—I think it's like once a month—and you have, there is a one year residency requirement, so there are so many ways we limit who could actually use this bill, to the point I believe if we were actually to implement the way that we are talking about it, almost nobody would use it. But the important thing for me is to get this bill on the books, and then see how it's working, and if it's not and people aren't using it, than make those corrections to actually allow people to use it. So that is what we've been discussing.Elliott explains his "bait and switch" tactic. His goal is to pass a "restrictive" assisted suicide bill and then expand the law later.
J.M. Sorrell, Executive Director of Massachusetts Death with Dignity, was quoted on a similar bill as saying,
“Once you get something passed, you can always work on amendments later.”
The assisted suicide lobby admits to their 'bait and switch' tactic.
The
key to holding the line on assisted suicide is to defeat assisted suicide legalization bills. To defeat an assisted suicide bill we need to call
it what it is. The purpose of assisted suicide is to cause death.
Another key to defeating assisted suicide bills is to explain the language of the assisted suicide bill. Legislators who support assisted suicide often vote based on ideology but when a legislator knows what the assisted suicide bill actually says, they will often vote NO.
The assisted suicide lobby uses false terminology to sell assisted
suicide as a form of healthcare and they claim that it provides "choice" at the
end-of-life. Assisted suicide is not healthcare or aid in dying and it
provides death.
Oregon
and Vermont have already been withdrawn their assisted suicide law residency requirement, allowing death tourism. The assisted suicide lobby is now pushing Colorado and New Jersey to permit death tourism.
A February 2023 article by James Reinl published in the Daily Mail reported that Dr Nicholas Gideonse had opened an assisted suicide clinic in Oregon to prescribe lethal assisted suicide poison for death tourists.
No comments:
Post a Comment