“Compassion should guide end-of-life policy, but compassion also demands caution,” the publication’s Editorial Board wrote last week.
The bill, called the End-of-Life Options for Terminally Ill Patients Act, would allow individuals who are at least 18 years old and are residents of Illinois to request and self-administer drugs to end their lives if they have a terminal disease with a prognosis of six months or less to live. The bill includes guardrails, such as two requests with a five-day waiting period between the first and second request, physician review, informed consent requirements, and mental capacity evaluations, as well as state data collection and conscience protections for health care workers.
The bill awaits a signature from Pritzker, who has 60 days from the bill’s passage to decide whether he will sign the legislation. He said last week he is still deciding whether or not he will sign the bill. If he signs it, Illinois would join 11 other states and Washington, DC, in allowing assisted suicide for terminally ill adults.
The Editorial Board listed “many concerns” regarding Illinois allowing assisted suicide.
“First, the safeguards this bill sets forth may seem like strong protections, but we fear they would soon become viewed as barriers to access. That’s what has sometimes played out in other states. For example, a few years ago California amended its rules to shorten the waiting period between a patient’s first and second oral request from 15 days to 48 hours,” they wrote.
They also said the “most persuasive arguments” against the bill came from advocates who spoke on behalf of people with disabilities.
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“We also took particular note of a Harvard study that surveyed doctors and found that 82.4% of those physicians believed that ‘people with significant disability have worse quality of life than non-disabled people.’ The study also found that only 40.7% of physicians were ‘very confident’ in their ability to provide equal quality care to patients with disabilities,” they wrote. “Those advocating for this community view these results as worrying, questioning whether some in the medical community have an inherent bias against their constituency. We say that’s a fair concern.”
They additionally raised the probability of seriously ill people viewing assisted suicide as a way of not becoming a financial burden to their families.
“Their worry is understandable, but we believe you can’t put a price tag on every moment you get with your loved ones,” they wrote.
The board looked to expanding assisted suicide laws in other countries, like Canada and the Netherlands, as cautionary tales. They specifically pointed out that Canada has moved beyond its original requirement for a terminal condition and removed the “reasonably foreseeable death” requirement for some cases.
“Assisted dying accounted for 1 in 20 deaths in Canada as of 2023,” they wrote.
The board also referenced the case of 29-year-old Zoraya ter Beek in the Netherlands, a woman with depression, autism, and “an unspecified personality disorder” who successfully pursued euthanasia because she was “tired of living.”
“Other nations show how swiftly a narrow exception can expand. Illinois should focus on easing pain, not authorizing physicians to hasten death,” the board wrote. “Pritzker said Monday that he’s unsure whether he’ll sign the bill. We hope he vetoes it.”
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
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