The Illinois state House has passed a physician-assisted suicide bill that would allow doctors to prescribe lethal doses of medication to patients who are terminally ill.
The legislation—which reportedly stalled Thursday afternoon in the state Senate—requires that people have a prognosis of less than six months to live and be of sound mind before allowing them to kill themselves.
The bill is just the latest of a series of legislative proposals, in New York and more than a dozen other states, that involve establishing the legal right to die with the help of a doctor. Physician-assisted suicide is currently legal in 10 states—California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington state—and the District of Columbia.
“Assisted suicide is always advertised under the banner of compassion. But the evidence from Canada and the Netherlands reveals the truth: Laws permitting assisted suicide lead to ever more people, whether elderly and sick, or simply young and depressed, feeling pressure to relieve the burden to themselves and society by dying quickly,” Jay Richards, director of the Center for Life, Religion, and Family and the William E. Simon senior research fellow in American principles and public policy at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal.
“No society can both respect the rights and dignity of every individual while also working to incentivize death. If Illinois endorses assisted suicide, we can expect precisely the same thing to happen there,” Richards explained.
Alexander Raikin, a visiting fellow in the bioethics and American democracy program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, discussed with The Daily Signal the state of play regarding the issue in the U.S. and the alarming rise of suicides in Canada after physician-assisted suicide—also known as medical assistance in dying (MAID)—was implemented in June of 2016.
Raikin pointed out that one state that has taken proactive action against physician-assisted suicide is West Virginia.
“West Virginia, during the election, they passed a referendum, the first referendum anywhere in the world, that specifically added a constitutional protection against euthanasia, assisted suicide, and mercy killing,” he explained.
The 2024 amendment enshrined into the West Virginia bill of rights a prohibition against those practices, which are currently illegal in the state.
Last year, it was reported that in Canada, which has been at the forefront of expanding the ability of its citizens to get help in ending their lives, physician-assisted suicide accounted for almost one in 20 deaths in 2023.
Raikin contended that the high percentage of deaths by suicide were not what the Canadian judicial system and policymakers had expected.
“They thought that it would remain as an option of last resort. They did not expect this to become a more common form of death than diabetes,” Raikin told The Daily Signal. A report by Raikin found MAID to be tied as the fifth-leading cause of death, tied with cerebrovascular diseases, in Canada in 2022. Only cancer, heart disease, COVID-19, and accidents surpassed it that year. Canada’s number of assisted-suicide deaths increased further in 2023.
Raikin also discussed how government funded health care and the general scarcity of financial resources in any society can lead to incentives to prefer assisted suicide over continued treatments and palliative care.
“This is simple mathematics. People who have illnesses, and people who have disabilities require medical care. If they die earlier, then the government doesn’t have to pay for it. But this is true, not just for public health care systems, but also for the American health care system, too,” he explained.
“The entire problem about this, it’s going to fall on those who are the most burdened by society, or who feel that they’re the most burdened in society,” the scholar emphasized, adding, “This is probably the most regressive policy that I can think of.”
