Pretty soon, doctor-assisted suicide is going to be as legal as Constitutional Carry for self-defense:
[New York and] six others are weighing whether to pass their own doctor-assisted suicide laws in the coming months.
Meanwhile, some of the 10 states that already allow medical aid-in-dying (MAiD) are loosening their rules, by cutting wait times, letting nurses join doctors in prescribing lethal drugs, and by letting out-of-staters visit to end their lives.
You may have heard of MAiD from its spread throughout Canada:
We've been able to act for a long time as if human euthanasia is not really a concern here — that it's more something that happens in, say, Western Europe and the Nordics.
But momentum for the ghoulish procedure has been growing here for years:
In the US, since Oregon's MAiD law came into force in 1997, nine other states and Washington DC have allowed terminally ill adults with less than six months to live to ask doctors for a lethal dose of drugs that they then ingest themselves, typically at home.
And the physicians selling these drugs — quite literally merchants of death — have been busy:
California has a similar sized population to Canada. In 2021, the latest year for which data are available, 772 Californians received scripts for lethal drugs and 486 died after ingesting them — mostly people aged over 60 with cancer, heart and brain disease and Parkinson's.
In the same year, doctors in Oregon prescribed 383 fatal doses and 238 people ended their lives.
And in a development that's surprising to absolutely nobody who's considered this issue, the standards around doctor-assisted suicide can be, well, a bit lax:
Only about 27 percent of Oregon's assisted deaths in 2021 involved people who said they were in too much pain, while more than half said they felt like a burden on loved ones, and 8 percent were fretting about money. ...
Last year, Dr Jennifer Gaudiani, who treats eating disorders, stoked controversy by prescribing lethal doses to three patients with anorexia nervosa — a mental health and body image condition that often sees sufferers starve themselves.
One 36-year-old woman died after ingesting the drugs. Dr Gaudiani, who still practices, argued that anorexia, while not as severe as cancer, is brutally lethal for sufferers.
Needless to say, this kind of "medical procedure" is a moral and palliative abomination. It disrespects and devalues human life in ways that are hard to quantify. It should be illegal, no questions asked.
But at the end of the day, law is driven by public demand: Even though there are many resources to actually help people, the demand to end one's life is growing.
