What the hell is wrong with Canada? Strange as it may seem, it’s a question that should be on the mind of every West Virginia voter this November.
Canada, where a 51-year old woman with chemical sensitivities received medically-assisted suicide after she was unable to find affordable housing free of cigarette smoke and chemical cleaners. Canada, where a suicidal patient was put to death with no more than “hearing loss” listed as a medical problem on his application for euthanasia. Canada, where one woman was considered eligible for assisted suicide because of the high financial cost of living with multiple disabilities, while anotherplanned to kill herself after spending what credit she could on pain management. Medically-assisted suicide has become the cheap, Canadian “solution” to poverty, pain, and disability.
We’re not like them. Sure, many have experienced the desire to be “rid” of suffering people. Caring for them is hard. It is often unrewarding. It reminds us of our own frailty. But we don’t put an end to suffering by putting an end to suffering people. That’s behavior we expect from Nazis—not from the people who beat them.
That’s why it is crucial to vote for Amendment One this November. Allowing for medically-assisted suicide is a first step down a slippery slope to the kinds of horrors that have become daily news in Canada, where 13,241 people died by physician-assisted suicide in 2022—a thirteenfold increase since its legalization in 2016.
Unfortunately, there are people working hard to make the United States akin to Killing Canada. Barbara Lee Combes was the president of Compassion in Dying—which was cleverly renamed “Compassion & Choices.” Combes actually praised the Canadian law, calling it “similar to what has served Oregonians so well for nearly 20 years.”
She’s certainly right in this sense: states like Oregon and California have been sledding down a similar slippery slope. It might not be the black-ice free fall of Canada. In California, for instance, physicians can’t administer the poison. You have totake it yourself. This slows things down, for “approximately 30–35% of individuals who were approved for an assisted death either never filled the prescription, or, having filled it, decided against using it, thus dying of natural causes.” Still, the Suicide States are slipping fast enough to serve as a dire warning for us here in West Virginia.
Oregon is home to more and more medically-assisted suicideseach year. Since legalization, the state has seen “a ten-fold increase in 25 years with no signs of the increase flatlining.”
Oregon has expanded the use of medically-assisted suicide far beyond its original purpose as an “option” for those who have less than six months to live. Now, suicide is promoted and utilized for illnesses that would become terminal—if only the patient chooses not to treat them. Because of this, death doctors in Oregon often avoid recommending real healthcare treatment, and instead, prescribe lethal pills in response to such treatable conditions as “gastrointestinal disease (liver disease), anorexia, arthritis, arteritis, blood disease, complications from a fall, hernia, kidney failure, medical care complications, musculoskeletal system disorders, sclerosis, and stenosis.”
Like Canada, medically-assisted suicide in Oregon is increasingly seen as solving social problems, rather than hastening a terminal diagnosis. 53% of those who received medically-assisted suicide in Oregon point to “being a ‘burden on family, friends, and caregivers’” as a motivation for their choice—which is “up from 34% between 1998 and 2002.”
The takeaway for West Virginia voters is this: Vote for Amendment One on November 5th. If we were to ever open the door to medically-assisted suicide, the norms and values of our state will start to reflect our sad decision. Our children will be raised to see suicide as a solution to difficulties, rather than as a cry for help and care that demands a real response. However it begins, it tends towards Canada, where suicide takes the place of medical treatment and the improvement of conditions. Voting for Amendment One will make it extremely difficult for liberallobbyists from Suicide States to push West Virginia onto their own slippery, slippery slope.
Pat McGeehan is a six-term state delegate from Hancock County. A graduate of the US Air Force Academy, he serves as the dean of a private school in the Northern Panhandle. Patresides with his daughter Kennedy in Chester, WV.
