Assisted suicide zealots have long sought to similarly impose their death agenda throughout the nation regardless of state laws to the contrary. Indeed, not long after Oregon voters legalized doctor-prescribed death in 1994, advocates tried to get the Supreme Court to impose a Roe v. Wade-type constitutional right to assisted suicide.
But euthanasia advocates never quit. After they failed to sweep the country with legalization efforts—despite decades of advocacy, only 10 states and the District of Columbia currently have legalized doctor-assisted suicide—they have now fashioned a new scheme to open the door to hastened death to any adult in the country with a terminal illness.
Here’s the disingenuous game. When advocates push to legalize assisted suicide, they always promise that “strict guidelines” will protect against abuse. One of these supposed safeguards requires that anyone seeking a lethal prescription be a state resident. In this way, they insincerely assure the wary that the state won’t become a “suicide tourism” destination similar to Switzerland—a country that allows suicide clinics to operate openly, to which people travel from around the world to be made dead.
Such restrictions were always a weak broth. Americans can generally change their residency any time they want. That’s part of living in a free country. And indeed, when Californian Brittany Maynard decided she wanted to commit assisted suicide after being diagnosed with brain cancer in 2014, she readily moved to Oregon, and a few months later, she was dead by a legally prescribed lethal overdose.
If the Colorado proposal passes, Americans will be able to access lethal prescriptions on the West and East coasts and in the heartland, meaning that anyone who qualifies for a lethal prescription under one of these states’ laws will be only a few hours’ drive from accessing assisted suicide. And it won’t stop there. I don’t doubt that within a few years, most state laws restricting assisted suicides to residents will be repealed.
Making this ongoing nationalization of assisted suicide even more fraught, most states that allow doctor-prescribed death are eliminating other safeguards as well. For example, some are reducing waiting periods from the request to dispensed overdoses to merely days. Moreover, some jurisdictions now allow certified nurse practitioners to prescribe lethally as well as doctors.
This nationalization of assisted suicide will have far-reaching consequences. It means that even residents of the reddest states will have ready access to assisted suicide. Moreover, assisted suicides will be facilitated by doctors or nurses who hardly know the patient—and indeed, who never treated the suicidal person for their underlying illness—doctors who may also be ignorant of their family situations and personal mental health histories. And it will open a new advocacy argument for universal state legalization that will assert that patients shouldn’t have to travel out of state but should be able to be made dead at home.
It won’t stop there, either. Ultimately, the euthanasia agenda isn’t about terminal conditions. Indeed, countries that have fully swallowed the hemlock theory that killing is a splendid answer to human suffering don’t impose terminal illness limitations on assisted suicide or lethal injection euthanasia. Canada—our closest cultural cousins—allows doctors to kill people with disabilities, the frail elderly, and the chronically sick who ask to die. The mentally ill can be so dispatched in the Netherlands and Belgium. Swiss suicide clinics routinely accommodate people who aren’t terminally ill. Meanwhile, Germany’s highest court ruled that committing suicide, assisted suicide, and assisting suicides are fundamental constitutional rights—regardless of the reasons why the suicidal person wants to be dead.
What can be done about this trend? Not much, I fear. States are generally in charge of their own public policies, which can’t be gainsaid by other states. Yes, Idaho criminalized assisting a minor to leave the state for an abortion, and it’s illegal under federal law to take a child out of state for sexual purposes. But I doubt such laws would pass constitutional muster if applied to adults and assisted suicide. And I suppose that laws could be passed prohibiting lethal prescriptions from being shipped across state lines. But beyond that, more creative minds than mine will have to find ways to thwart assisted suicide nationalization.
So here we are. Even if most of the states retain their laws against assisted suicide—as they should—they will lose much of their protective value. Indeed, one can foresee the introduction of a lucrative niche assisted suicide travel industry, companies that—for a fee—arrange the proper medical approvals, transport suicidal people to a state where doctor-prescribed death is legal, and after they are dead, return them home in a casket for final disposition. Alas, such is the darkening world in which we now live.
