Legal assisted suicide treats human life as disposable

In this season of joy the Grim Reaper is hovering. Gov. Kathy Hochul announced on Wednesday that she intends to sign the Medical Aid in Dying Act.

This means New York next month is to join 12 states and the District of Columbia where one can legally off him or herself with doctors’ support and a massive barbiturate overdose.

Right-to-Die ghouls are cheering!

“This law will represent the culmination of more than 10 years of determined, consistent effort by hundreds, no, thousands, of New Yorkers who advocated for this law,” said Corinne Carey, senior campaign director for Compassion & Choices NY/NJ, the ill-named advocacy group whose sole purpose is to remove choice and steer people toward the grave.

Madness.

While legalized suicide is sold to the masses as the compassionate solution to a terminal diagnosis, in practice there’s little empathetic about this soon-to-be law. Instead, the pressure on people to kill themselves has shifted into high gear.

The governor has come to this wrong decision for all the right reasons – she watched her mother die from ALS.

“New York has long been a beacon of freedom, and now it is time we extend that freedom to terminally ill New Yorkers who want the right to die comfortably and on their own terms,” she said, adding, “I am all too familiar with the pain of seeing someone you love suffer and being powerless to stop it. Although this was an incredibly difficult decision, I ultimately determined that with the additional guardrails agreed upon with the legislature, this bill would allow New Yorkers to suffer less – to shorten not their lives, but their deaths.”

The reality, however, is altogether different. Life, you see, can be more costly than the alternative.

In 2016, I interviewed California mom-of-four Stephanie Packer (now Aguayo.) Diagnosed in 2012 at age 29 with scleroderma, a chronic autoimmune disease that causes scar tissue to form in her lungs, a doctor told her she had three years to live. When she learned she could extend her life with a form of chemotherapy, her medical insurance company denied her claim, but a representative offered her a
cheaper alternative: life-ending drugs.

The copay? $1.20.

“My jaw dropped,” she told me.

Packer refused to take her own life and instead fought for survival, but found little support for anything but her hasty demise. After threatening to go to the media, her insurer relented and approved the chemo.

Thirteen years after her three-year death sentence, she’s still drawing breath. Divorced after her grim prognosis, she has remarried, and has spoken out widely against physician-assisted suicide.

The new law is supposed to protect those who probably shouldn’t die from making unalterable decisions by enacting safeguards, including requiring death candidates to undergo mental-health evaluations and
in-person visits by physicians. But I see nothing in the statute that saves people who’ve simply gone along with this race off a cliff.

I fear we are going down a slippery slope. In some countries, it doesn’t take a deadly disease for someone to qualify for legal suicide. In Belgium in 2015, for example, a severely depressed 24-year-old woman received government approval to obtain a lethal injection. The woman reportedly changed her mind and decided to live.

We must stop this macabre lunacy and quit pushing death.