Illinois passes assisted death law...

 

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. Fox News/Getty.

Illinois has passed an assisted suicide law, which will allow terminal patients to end their lives with medical assistance. Fox News. The law is known as the Medical Aid in Dying law or "Deb's law" after Deb Robertson, a woman with a rare illness that lobbied for the law. Proponents say that the law will assist terminal patients that would otherwise suffer, though religious groups object to assisting suicide. Others fear the law will be used to coerce the poor or disabled into choosing death in order for the state to save money. Doctors and other health care providers are not required to assist those that wish to use the law if they object to it on moral grounds, but are required to refer patients to a doctor that will, which is another major objection to the law. 

My Comment:

This is an example of where I have completely changed my mind on an issue. For most of my life I thought that these kind of assisted suicide programs were a good thing. After all, anyone who has seen someone at the end of their life has had the thought, why even draw this out? At some point enough is enough and it's a good thing to end suffering. 

Part of me still believes that is true. I do think we tend to care more about the length of life instead of the quality of life and there is a point where we just need to let things go. And the religious objections to these laws fall on deaf ears in my case. Christianity generally feels death is always something that should be objected to and fought, even when it makes little practical sense to do so, like with a medically hopeless case, abortion of someone that would have zero quality of life or even executing a mass murderer. 

So how did change my mind on this issue? One word. Canada. Canada passed a law in 2016 called the Medical Assistance in Dying law (MAiD). That one law has totally changed how I thought about this issue and now I think it's an abomination, just because how it was implemented there and just how absurdly many people are dying under the program. An absurd 5.1% of all deaths in Canada occurred under the MAiD program, showing that the law there isn't just used sparingly and under extreme circumstances. Indeed, Canada had even passed a law saying you could use MAiD just if you were mentally ill and had no terminal illness. 

And there is a real chance that these laws will indeed be used to pressure people to end their lives. Why? Money. End of life care is incredibly expensive and in Canada's publicly funded system, MAiD has saved them millions of dollars. There are many documented cases of Canadians being pushed into ending their lives for monetary reasons, with coverage being denied but MAiD being covered. And it has also happened in the 11 other states (and Washington DC) that have these programs. 

I have little doubt that this will be the case in Illinois as well. It's not a well run state and it has a large population of vulnerable people that could be coerced into choosing Deb's Law to end their live so the state or an insurance company can save money. That is, quite frankly, horrific. Nobody should be pressured into something like this, it should be their own choice and their own choice alone. And that's why I changed my mind, because I saw what is happening in Canada and now it's going to be happening in Illinois as well...