From LifeSiteNews

By Cassy Cooke

After her parents both became seriously ill and her mother wanted to undergo assisted suicide, a Washington woman convinced her father to die also.

Key takeaways

• Corinne Gregory Sharpe spoke to PEOPLE about her experience convincing her parents to undergo assisted suicide together.
• After her mother was diagnosed with aortic stenosis in her 90s, she lived for a few more years before her health began to decline. At that point, she said she wanted to die by assisted suicide.
• Her father did not have a health condition outside of having previously had a stroke; however, he was nervous to live without his wife. Sharpe convinced him of a “solution” – to kill himself alongside her mother.
• Couple assisted suicide has become romanticized by the media.

The details

Corinne Gregory Sharpe spoke with PEOPLE about her efforts to convince her father to undergo assisted suicide alongside her mother. She said her family had always been close, so when her mother became ill, her father was nervous to live without her.

Sharpe’s mother was first diagnosed with aortic stenosis in 2018 at the age of 92 and given less than two years to live if she did not undergo surgery.

“And even if she had the procedure, there was no guarantee that she was gonna live any longer,” Sharpe said. “So her attitude was sort of like, well, let’s just kind of let things go as they go.”

READ: Colorado gave over 500 people assisted suicide drugs solely for eating disorders in 2024

But Sharpe’s mother didn’t die within those two years. In fact, it was three years later that her health began to decline, only after she fell and hit her head. Shortly after that, Sharpe’s father appeared to suffer small strokes. “So now I have two parents in medical care,” Sharpe said.

Her parents were able to be at a rehabilitation facility together, but Sharpe said they were “losing the will to live,” so she brought them back home. Doctors recommended hospice, but her mother decided she wanted to undergo assisted suicide, which left her father distraught. Sharpe came up with an “interesting” solution.

“I had a very interesting, serious heart-to-heart conversation with him one evening after my mom had gone to bed,” she continued. “And he was just panicked like, ‘What happens to me if she goes first?’ That’s always been a concern of his. He couldn’t see a scenario where he would want to continue if mom was gone.”

She added, “He’s always been afraid of dying. But I think he was more afraid of being left alone. He was like, ‘Well, if she’s gonna go and I have the option to go at the same time, then I’m getting on that horse.’ So I was like, look, we’ll figure something out.”

At this point, her father was not dying, and if he suffered another stroke, doctors believed he could end up incapacitated, but not terminally ill. Yet Sharpe was able to get her father approved for assisted suicide, calling it “a race” to do so.

Sharpe spent what would be the last few weeks of her parents’ lives hosting family dinners, making them their favorite meals, and sharing memories as a way to “repay my parents for everything they’d done for me.” It sounds nice, but there’s no need for an adult child to wait until she knows her parents are dying to do such things for them.

When the drug powder arrived, Sharpe took a selfie with the delivery man and then stuck the drug on a shelf, where it feasibly could have been accessed by anyone. She then joked about choosing Friday the 13th to die, which is when her parents ultimately took the drugs – Friday, August 13, 2021.

“The counselors prepared the cocktail, we sat around and shared some private moments together. They got to sit in their own bed and hold hands with each other and talk before they were able to take the meds,” she said. “We put music on and they took the cocktail. Then we poured a glass of wine and we had a final toast. About 10 minutes after they drank it, they went to sleep.”

Zoom out

It has become increasingly common and romanticized for elderly couples to be euthanized together. This includes murder-suicides and those who opt to die together  simply because they are elderly.

But the reality of assisted suicide is that it may not be as peaceful and romantic as many have been led to believe.

As Dr. Joel Zivot, an associate professor of anesthesiology and surgery at the Emory School of Medicine and an expert on “physician participation in lethal injection,” previously explained, assisted suicide can be excruciating, even if it doesn’t appear to be.

“[F]or both euthanasia and executions, paralytic drugs are used,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Spectator. “These drugs, given in high enough doses, mean that a patient cannot move a muscle, cannot express any outward or visible sign of pain. But that doesn’t mean that he or she is free from suffering.”

He added, “People who want to die deserve to know that they may end up drowning, not just falling asleep.”

Furthermore, a study in the medical journal Anaesthesia found that prolonged, painful deaths from assisted suicide and euthanasia were far from rare, with a considerable number of patients taking 30 hours to die, though some took seven days. Experiments with assisted suicide likewise have been painful, with one drug cocktail “burning patients’ mouths and throats, causing some to scream in pain.” The same drugs labeled as too inhumane to be used for lethal injection are used in assisted suicide.

The bottom line

Suicide is not dignified, peaceful, or romantic. Efforts are made to prevent suicide unless the person in question is elderly, ill, or disabled. And then, it’s made to appear noble and romantic to take your own life.

Reprinted with permission from Live Action.

Fr0m LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The lawsuit says Colorado’s assisted suicide law violates federal protections by allowing physicians to prescribe lethal drugs to some disabled patients under circumstances where others would be directed to mental health care

Doctors in Colorado are pushing assisted suicide on hundreds of patients solely because they suffer from eating disorders, according to a patients’ advocate sharing the harrowing story of one such case.

Writing in the Denver Post, Patient Rights Action Fund and Institute for Patient Rights executive director Matt Vallière tells the story of his friend Jane Allen, who battled anorexia “most of her life,” who in 2018 was diagnosed with “terminal anorexia,” a relatively recent diagnosis which has been criticized as overly broad and dangerous.

Her eating disorder doctor, Jane wrote, “would ‘make an exception’ for me and ‘allow’ me to die, if that was my choice. It didn’t feel like my choice – I felt coerced and spent an incredibly agonizing months in an assisted living facility.” She eventually received the suicide drugs, but was saved by her father winning a guardianship order and having the drugs destroyed.

“I ate just enough to not die right away. And then I ate more,” Jane wrote. “I weaned off the morphine and all the other hospice drugs that kept me in such a fog. I was getting better, and then I was told that I was too much of a liability and dropped from the clinic. I moved from Colorado to Oregon. I have a job that I love, a new puppy, and a great group of friends. I’m able to fuel my body to hike and do the things I love. I’m repairing my relationship with my family, and I have a great therapist who is helping me process all of this. Things obviously aren’t perfect, and I still have hard days. But I also have balance, and flexibility, and a life that is so much more than I was told would ever be possible for me.”

Jane ultimately passed away due to complications from her years of anorexia, which Vallière wonders could have been prevented by not detouring her down the terminal anorexia route. Regardless, her story details how easily similar cases can end in suicide for people without people willing to fight to give them hope. Live Action notes that last year, Colorado saw a record number of people, 510, prescribed suicide drugs solely for dietary disorders.

“What we do know is that these laws are not so rosy as the propaganda would have you believe,” Vallière writes, adding “there has been and will be more collateral damage in people like Jane or Coloradan Mary Gossman, who was told by a nationally renowned Denver eating disorder treatment facility, ‘there’s nothing we can do for you,’ which qualified her for lethal drugs under the law. She’s in a better place now and has joined as a plaintiff in a lawsuit to overturn the law. So, I ask: how many collateral deaths are acceptable to you?”

That lawsuit says that Colorado’s so-called “medical aid-in-dying” or assisted suicide law violates federal protections by allowing physicians to prescribe lethal drugs to some disabled patients under circumstances where others would be directed to mental health care, by “assum[ing] that a request for assisted suicide is not an indication of a mental disorder, when other Colorado laws make precisely the opposite assumption for virtually everyone else.”

Twelve U.S. states plus the District of Columbia allow assisted suicide. In April, however, a bill to legalize euthanasia failed in Maryland.

As Vallière has previously argued elsewhere, current euthanasia programs in the United States constitute discrimination against patients with life-threatening conditions in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, as when a state will “will pay for every instance of assisted suicide” but not palliative care, “I don’t call that autonomy, I call that eugenics.”

Live Action’s Bridget Sielicki further notes that “because a paralytic is involved, a person can look peaceful, while they actually drown to death in their own bodily secretions. Experimental assisted suicide drugs have led to the ‘burning of patients’ mouths and throats, causing some to scream in pain.’ Furthermore, a study in the medical journal Anaesthesia found that a third of patients took up to 30 hours to die after ingesting assisted suicide drugs, while four percent took seven days to die.”

Support is available to talk to those struggling with thoughts of ending their lives. The Suicide & Crisis Lifeline can be reached by calling or texting 988.