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.

From LifeSiteNews

By Jonathon Van Maren

Premier Danielle Smith is following through on a promise to address growing concerns with Canada’s euthanasia regime.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has sent a mandate letter to Justice Minister Mickey Amery directing him to draft and introduce new legislation on euthanasia to ensure better oversight of so-called “medical aid in dying,” or “MAiD” and to prohibit it for those suffering solely from mental illness.

In December of last year, Smith’s United Conservative government indicated that they would seek to address growing concerns with Canada’s euthanasia regime. Mainstream media outlets attacked the move, with the CBC actually reporting that: “Some are concerned new limitations could impact already vulnerable Albertans.”

Premier Smith has now followed through on that promise. The September 25 mandate letter, which lays out directives on a wide range of issues, calls for the justice minister to take steps to protect vulnerable Albertans suffering from mental illness:

As lead, work with relevant ministries to introduce legislation to provide greater oversight and appropriate safeguards for medical assistance in dying and prohibit medical assistance in dying where a person seeks this procedure based solely on a mental illness.

In an email to the CBC, Amery stated that while euthanasia law is under federal jurisdiction, healthcare falls under provincial jurisdiction. The CBC falsely claimed that mental illness “has never been an approved sole eligibility factor for MAID, though the government has considered permitting it.” In fact, the Trudeau government passed Bill C-7, which legalized MAID for those struggling with mental illness, in 2021.

That eligibility expansion has been delayed twice—in 2023 and 2024—and is now slated to come into effect in 2027. Despite those delays, Bill C-7 is still law. MP Tamara Jansen and MP Andrew Lawton are currently championing Bill C-218, the “Right to Recover Act,” which would reverse this and make it illegal to offer or perpetrate euthanasia on someone struggling solely with mental illness.

The CBC’s coverage of this move was predictably repulsive. In addition to their disinformation on euthanasia for mental illness, they reported that “Smith’s letter directing new provincial legislation on MAID comes almost a year after the government surveyed just under 20,000 Albertans on whether they think the province should step in. Nearly half of those surveyed disagreed with putting in more guardrails on MAID decisions.”

“Nearly half” is an unbelievably deceitful way of reporting on those results. In fact, 62% were in favor of legislation for a dedicated agency monitoring euthanasia processes; 55% were in favor of a MAID dispute mechanism allowing families or eligible others to challenge decisions to protect vulnerable people, such as those with disabilities or mental health struggles; and 67% supported restricting euthanasia to those with physical illnesses rather than mental illnesses. The CBC did not report on a single one of those numbers.

Provincial legislation to protect people with mental illnesses is badly needed, although I pray that by the time Justice Minister Amery gets around to drafting it, the Right to Recover Act will be passed in Parliament, and provincial action will be unnecessary. In the meantime, it is increasingly clear that much of Canada’s mainstream press coverage of this issue actively threatens the lives of the suicidal and those struggling with mental illnesses. If their dishonesty and attempts and manufacturing consent were not so routine, they would be breathtaking.

Jonathon Van Maren

Jonathon’s writings have been translated into more than six languages and in addition to LifeSiteNews, has been published in the National Post, National Review, First Things, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The Stream, the Jewish Independent, the Hamilton Spectator, Reformed Perspective Magazine, and LifeNews, among others. He is a contributing editor to The European Conservative.