Colorado’s terrible idea

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

A major ballot initiative in Colorado could establish not just the right to die but the duty to die for terminally ill patients. John Stonestreet this week listed the many problems with the proposal to legalize physician-assisted suicide in his home state.

Stonestreet related the story of a pastor from Canada who had three parishioners diagnosed with cancer at one time. The first question doctors asked all three was, do you want to be euthanized? For patients facing that question, pressure to relieve their families’ emotional and financial burdens can affect their decisions. And insurance companies have added to the pressure, Stonestreet said, citing numerous reports over the last 20 years in which companies said they would not cover life-extending treatments like chemotherapy, “but we will cover the $50 cocktail for you to kill yourself.”

The Colorado initiative, Proposition 106, also requires coroners to lie on the death certificates of people who commit assisted suicide. The certificates are supposed to list their terminal condition, not suicide, as the cause of death.

“That’s just not true. It’s an integrity issue,” Stonestreet said.

The proposal requires doctors to prescribe the life-ending medication, but they don’t have to administer it.

“So now you have the temptation for coercion, pressure,” and even foul play by people who know the patient, Stonestreet said. Not only that, but the availability of a suicide pill leads to the emotional abandonment of people in their most vulnerable moments.

“So let’s say that a prescription has been administered, and it’s there on the nightstand, and somebody has a particularly bad day. These aren’t the people we should shun and push away and say, ‘It would be better if you just weren’t with us,’” Stonestreet said. “These are the people that we should be caring for.”

Finally, the Colorado assisted-suicide initiative has the potential to add to the state’s problem with teen suicide. Suicide is contagious among teens, Stonestreet noted:

“When one person does it, it justifies it for another. If we tell a student that their grandmother is justified in ending her own life, how can we tell that same student that he is not justified in ending is life as a solution for his problem?”

Listen to “Culture Friday” on the Oct. 21, 2016, episode of The World and Everything in It.