Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed legislation last week expanding the state’s assisted suicide laws.
Senate Bill 24-068 weakens many of the safeguards surrounding assisted death by allowing non-physicians like advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) to evaluate the patient and prescribe assisted suicide drugs. It also reduces the waiting period for assisted suicide from 15 days to seven days and allows the doctor or APRN to waive the waiting period altogether if they believe that the patient is near death.
According to Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, many states like Colorado seek to allow APRNs to administer suicide because there are not enough physicians willing to take part in the process. Schadenberg also points out that nearly every state that has legalized assisted suicide has expanded its laws, removing the so-called ‘safeguards’ in the process.
“The goal of the assisted suicide lobby is to legalize assisted suicide in more states and to expand the scope of the physician-assisted death laws in the states that have legalized assisted suicide,” Schadenberg writes.
The bill was praised by the pro-assisted death lobby in the state, which called it a “huge success.”
“The reduction of time between the first and second oral requests from 15 days to seven days is crucial for dying people who don’t have the time to wait to access the compassionate end-of-life care option they are entitled to,” said Gina Gentry, campaign manager for Compassion and Choices.
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The Colorado Catholic Conference told the Centennial Citizen that it “laments the expansion of Colorado’s unjust physician-assisted suicide law.”
“So-called ‘medical aid-in-dying’ targets the most vulnerable in our society, corrupts the medical practice, distorts the patient-doctor relationship by violating a doctor’s commitment to the health of his patients, and disregards obligations to our elderly, disabled, or ill members of our community by viewing them as a burden,” the conference said.
Palliative care and/or hospice care is not the same as assisted dying. In Canada, where assisted dying is becoming more common and less stringent, palliative care is being de-emphasized in favor of giving the means of suicide to those who request it. The USCCB writes:
Palliative care… addresses symptoms beyond physical pain, in ways that go beyond medication. Patients facing serious illness may feel hopeless and depressed, as though their lives have lost meaning. Addressing psychological, emotional, and spiritual problems is essential to palliative care. Assisted suicide alleviates none of these problems, but gives in to them…
Assisted suicide does not enhance medicine. As noted by a doctor specializing in palliative and hospice care in the Netherlands, killing “becomes a substitute for learning how to relieve the suffering of dying patients.”
Colorado’s effort to make assisted suicide more readily available is unsurprising, given the state’s extreme pro-abortion position.
As governor, Polis has also signed legislation attacking pro-life pregnancy resource centers that offer aid to pregnant women and families, as well as laws that require insurance companies to cover abortion and shield law-breaking abortionists from prosecution. The state currently has no gestational limits on abortion. When a society actively advocates for the death of its youngest, most vulnerable citizens, it isn’t a stretch before it is also advocating for the deaths of its sick and elderly.
