Assisted suicide was offered to Jane Allen. She had an eating disorder.

This guest commentary was published by The Denver Post on October 2, 2025.

By Matt Vallière

The big selling point of assisted suicide laws is that they are supposedly compassionate and a progressive step toward enlightened autonomy. But assisted suicide is anything but compassionate for vulnerable people, like the tragic story of my friend with anorexia, Jane Allen, which shows how assisted suicide laws threaten the lives of the young and curable.

There is a controversial diagnosis circulating called “terminal anorexia,” which is an arrow to the heart of young people with eating disorders who are already experiencing distorted ideas of their worthiness to live. Now, where assisted suicide is legal, they have the state and part of the medical profession telling them they were better off dead.

After struggling with anorexia for most of her life, in 2018, Jane was living in Colorado Springs and getting help for her mental health disabilities, including her eating disorder. She ended up in the care of an exclusive boutique eating disorder practice. She was in and out of hospitals and residential treatment. Jane’s condition resisted treatment, and she ended up receiving a “terminal anorexia” diagnosis.

Jane wrote that her eating disorder doctor, “would ‘make an exception’ for me and ‘allow’ me to die, if that was my choice. It didn’t feel like my choice – I felt coerced and spent an incredibly agonizing months in an assisted living facility.” Jane did not get the lethal prescription directly from her eating disorder doctor; instead, she was referred to another doctor who promptly checked the boxes required under Colorado’s “safeguards,” and saw to it that Jane got the lethal drugs.

Jane’s life was saved at the last minute when her father received a guardianship order from a Colorado judge and was able to have the lethal drugs destroyed. After that, Jane said, 

“I ate just enough to not die right away. And then I ate more. I weaned off the morphine and all the other hospice drugs that kept me in such a fog. I was getting better, and then I was told that I was too much of a liability and dropped from the [boutique] clinic.”

“I moved from Colorado to Oregon. I have a job that I love, a new puppy, and a great group of friends. I’m able to fuel my body to hike and do the things I love. I’m repairing my relationship with my family, and I have a great therapist who is helping me process all of this. Things obviously aren’t perfect, and I still have hard days. But I also have balance, and flexibility, and a life that is so much more than I was told would ever be possible for me.”

A week before she planned to go public with her story, however, she died suddenly of complications to her health caused by over two decades of starving herself. To this day, I wonder whether the months of treatment lost during Jane’s detour into “terminal anorexia” care worsened her condition, whether she could still be with us today, doing all the good. We’ll never know…

What we do know is that these laws are not so rosy as the propaganda would have you believe. They are as messy as life itself and there has been and will be more collateral damage in people like Jane or Coloradan, Mary Gossman, who was told by a nationally renowned Denver eating disorder treatment facility, “there’s nothing we can do for you,” which qualified her for lethal drugs under the law. She’s in a better place now and has joined as a plaintiff in a lawsuit to overturn the law. So, I ask: how many collateral deaths are acceptable to you? For whatever purported good they do, these laws just aren’t safe.

Matt Vallière is the executive director of the Patient Rights Action Fund and the Institute for Patient Rights both of which advocate against physician assisted suicide policies.

Previous articles on this topic:

• Netherlands woman dies by euthanasia based on anorexia (Link).
• Landmark study: Assisted death for eating disorders (Link).
• At least 60 people with eating disorders euthanized or assisted in suicide since 2012 (Link).
• ANAD clarifies that Anorexia Nervosa is not a terminal condition (Link)
• When I was Anorexic I would have chosen assisted suicide (Link).
• Psychiatrist: Anorexia does not justify Aid in Dying (Link).
• Anorexia is not a terminal condition (Link).