Blue state liberals want to push their culture of death on everyone
Tom Joyce
It’s not enough for blue state liberals to embrace a culture of death in their respective states. They also want to push it onto the rest of the country.
New Jersey is the latest example of this unfortunate reality. Compassion and Choices, a paradoxically named organization that advocates for the liberalization of physician-assisted suicide laws, recently filed a lawsuit in New Jersey to get the state to drop its residency requirement for the life-ending practice.
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If the pro-death side gets what it wants, it would make New Jersey the third state in the country with no residency requirement for its physician-assisted suicide laws, along with Oregon and Vermont.
It’s bad enough that physician-assisted suicide is legal anywhere. Only 10 states have legalized the practice; making it law is not a priority elsewhere because good lawmaking does not involve killing people for the benefit of for-profit health insurance companies.
Physician-assisted suicide preys on the weak and the vulnerable and has dangerous implications. While proponents may argue that allowing people to suffer near the end of life is cruel, killing people is worse. In Colorado, people use physician-assisted suicide to kill themselves because of eating disorders such as anorexia. Plus, in Canada, people seek out these deaths due to poverty and depression. Medical professionals have even suggested veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder consider doing it.
Elsewhere, the practice is even more normalized. Belgium removed having a terminal illness diagnosis as a requirement from its physician-assisted suicide law in 2002 and extended its so-called right to die to terminally ill children in 2014. Two healthy American women traveled to Switzerland in February 2022 and never returned; they died by physician-assisted suicide.
Even with supposed safeguards in place, the practice cuts people’s lives far shorter than the time they may otherwise have left on Earth.
Common proposals in blue states limit the scope to those with less than six months to live, though diagnoses are often wrong. When late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) was told he had less than six months to live, he lived for another 15 months. As a result, his widowed wife, Victoria Kennedy, opposed physician-assisted suicide in the 2012 Massachusetts referendum, where it failed 51% to 49%.
Additionally, today’s safeguard is tomorrow’s burdensome regulation that the pro-death advocates will want eliminated. After all, when do liberal advocacy groups show an interest in stopping once they get what they claim to want? They didn’t stop at safe, legal, and rare, or same-sex civil marriage, so what makes anyone think they’ll stop here?
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Horrifically, suicides are already up to an all-time high in this country. The government should look for ways to make them less common, perhaps by improving mental health, healthcare affordability, and palliative care, rather than allowing hospitals to kill people and label it healthcare.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts.