By Rita L. Marker

   Can we become a society where assisted suicide is common, where it is considered normal? Can we go from being horrified by assisted suicide, to tolerating it, and eventually, to supporting it? Will we, in the not too distant future, feel guilty for not “choosing” assisted suicide?

    The answer is “Yes” to all of the above unless we work now to prevent such a nightmare scenario. But there is much work to be done.
The first step is to know what is meant by assisted suicide. The next step is to educate ourselves and others about its very real threat and, then, to make opposition to assisted suicide a high priority.

    Until now, even among those who consider themselves pro-life, the topic of assisted suicide has remained on the back burner at best. Consider, for example, the fact that at conferences and conventions, assisted suicide is rarely the subject of a general session. When it is on the agenda, the topic is usually covered in one of many concurrent workshops. A handful of people take up a few chairs in a small room, while the vast majority of attendees are filling rooms to hear about traditional pro-life issues (abortion, stem cell research, pregnancy counseling, etc.)

    It isn’t that people favor assisted suicide. They just haven’t thought about it and, when they hear “assisted suicide,” they erroneously assume it isn’t relevant to their own lives or those of their loved ones. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    The current debate about assisted suicide does not deal with removing life-sustaining treatment. Nor is it about giving rights to patients. It is about giving doctors the power to prescribe intentional deadly overdoses of drugs.

    It is the act of intentionally, knowingly and directly providing the means of death to another person so that the person can use that means to commit suicide. If the person who dies performs the last act, assisted suicide has occurred.

    Advocates know that the general public does not respond favorably to the words “assisted suicide,” so they camouflage the practice by referring to it in euphemistic terms like “aid-in-dying,” “death with dignity,” “physician-assisted death,” etc.

    In 1994, the State of Oregon became the first state to transform the crime of assisted suicide into a “medical treatment.” Today, pharmacies in Oregon dispense prescriptions, accompanied by instructions to “take this with a light snack and alcohol to cause death,” and health insurance pays for those prescriptions.

    When Oregon’s law went into effect, assisted-suicide activists thought they were on their way to achieving their eventual goal of death on demand for any person for any reason. They proposed Oregon-style laws in more than twenty states. But, each time, they met with defeat – until November 2008 when Washington State voters passed the “Washington Death with Dignity Act,” which is virtually identical to Oregon’s law.

    Within less than a month, Montana District Court Judge Dorothy McCarter ruled that the Montana State Constitution’s right to privacy and human dignity provisions protect the right to assisted suicide (although she called it “death with dignity”) and that those rights incorporate a doctor’s assistance “so that the patient can obtain a prescription for drugs that he can take to end his own life, if and when he so determines.”

    McCarter implies that Montanans cannot commit suicide without a doctor’s assistance. Ironically, Montana’s rate of suicide already ranks number one among the fifty states. So dire is Big Sky Country’s suicide rate that the state legislature spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on suicide prevention programs over the last year.

    With three states in their win column, assisted-suicide activists believe that other states will fall in line. At the beginning of the Washington State campaign, former Governor Booth Gardner, the prime spokesperson for the initiative, told the New York Times magazine that the campaign was part of a larger agenda.

    He explained that he saw Oregon-style laws as the first step and that, if Washington‘s law passed, other states would follow. Gradually, he said, the nation’s resistance would subside, the culture would shift and laws with more latitude would be passed.

    Washington’s law passed for several reasons. The 4 to 1 disparity in funding certainly played a role. Even more important, however, was that the majority of voters bought the “Yes” campaign’s mantra that ten years of legalized assisted suicide in Oregon proves that the practice is transparent, safe, abuse free, and even beneficial to overall health care — despite proof to the contrary. Unfortunately, the “No” campaign failed to provide that proof to the voters.

   (The facts about Oregon, Wash-ington and Montana, and what they mean for all of us, will be discussed in the next issue.)

    Rita L. Marker is an attorney and executive director of the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide. Reprinted with permission. HLA Action News, Winter 2009, Human Life Alliance, Minneapolis, MN, www.humanlife.org.