by Diane Robertson
The Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Wyoming state legislatures are all currently considering bills to legalize assisted suicide.
California, Colorado, Montana, Oregon, Vermont and Washington state have laws allowing physician assisted suicide. It’s the new legislative move sweeping the nation.
Most of the bills are written to pass the scruples of some of the more independent and conservative law makers by requiring people who desire doctor assisted suicide to be diagnosed as terminally ill by two physicians. New Mexico, on the other hand, is going in for the kill, literally.
New Mexico’s bill, if it passes as is, will allow doctors, nurse practitioners and physician assistants to diagnose terminal illness and prescribe life-ending medication the same day with no second opinion for all adults.
Law makers in New Mexico and every other state should not be fooled. No matter what protections are placed in the law to make it rare, once it is legalized, they will be pushed to get rid of those safeguards. Public opinion will start to change. The slippery slope will have begun.
The Netherlands and Belgium are a great example of that. The Netherlands legalized euthanasia in 2001 with protections similar to those currently under consideration in the 2017 bills in the above-mentioned states. By 2014, Belgium had legalized child assisted suicide and on January 2, 2015 the Netherlands released a report stating that doctors had euthanized 650 infants in accordance to law. February 13, 2014, Belgium legalized euthanasia by lethal injection for the mentally ill making it possible for suicidal teenagers to seek help in dying. That same year, the Netherlands made plans to harvest organs from euthanasia patients. In 2016, Belgium began to allow healthy people who just don’t feel like life matters to obtain death by legal injection.
So beware, these laws have a way of changing the hearts and the minds of the people, the doctors, and the law makers. One year, people may think suicide is horrible. Another year, suicide is considered compassionate for the terminally ill. A few years down the road and it’s acceptable for the severely depressed. Another couple of years and law makers and the public begin to think suicide is a great way to harvest organs because it saves the lives of people who want to live. And then it is used for handicapped children or children with cancer. After all, it is cheaper than medical care. Before people realize that they have changed their minds at all, they will believe that people should die when they want to and how they want to—it’s death on demand!