Allowing physicians to help people kill themselves is a misguided “game-changer” in how society responds to suffering, a doctor who specializes in children’s medicine said during a Heritage Foundation event on assisted suicide.

“Physician-assisted suicide redefines the concept of a medical good as never before,” Dr. G. Kevin Donovan, professor and director of pediatrics at Georgetown University, told the audience for the panel discussion.

“For the first time, we will plan to end suffering by ending the life of the sufferer,” Donovan said.

The event Monday, which featured Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., a sponsor of legislation on the topic, focused on the societal dangers of physician-assisted suicide.

Ryan T. Anderson, a senior research fellow at Heritage, called the widespread legalization of the practice “a grave mistake.”

So far, five states plus the District of Columbia have legalized physician-assisted suicide. But, Anderson noted, 16 other states have introduced bills to allow it.

“Physician-assisted suicide comes with serious costs,” he said. “Too many people view it as purely a private matter between an autonomous adult who desires to die and another autonomous adult who can provide medical assistance to die.”

Anderson was host of the event along with Kathryn Jean Lopez, a senior fellow at National Review Institute.

Lankford said the issue is personal for him because someone in his own family could be targeted by proponents of assisted suicide. Their standard for proceeding, he noted, is a diagnosis that someone has six months or less to live.

“I have a very dear family member … given a diagnosis of six months to live in 1981, and she is still kicking and is still a pretty amazing lady,” Lankford said.

Physician assisted suicide fundamentally changes the doctor patient relationship — @SenatorLankford pic.twitter.com/1sHOZJhe38

— Kathryn Jean Lopez (@kathrynlopez) February 27, 2017

So the standard is presumptuous, the Oklahoma Republican said:

This belief that somehow medicine can look over the shoulders of someone and tell someone exactly how long they [will] live begs the reality of just everyday care for individuals and … quite frankly, for those of us who are followers of God, just the belief in what God can choose to do in the life of an individual and the dignity of that person.

Before the District’s physician-assisted suicide law went into effect Feb. 18, Lankford introduced a resolution attempting to halt its implementation.

Donovan also said it is impossible for his fellow doctors to be completely accurate in judging the lifespans of patients because it is not something they have been trained to do.

“There are at least a couple of things that doctors do not do well,” Donovan said. “And the first one is prognosticate the end of someone’s life because actually, we do not have much training in that and we do not have much data. Every patient is an individual.”

Also on the panel was Melissa Ortiz, the founder of Able Americans, an organization that seeks to give a voice to those with chronic illness and physical and mental disabilities. Ortiz said her husband’s own neurological disability helped convince her that society must reframe the discussion:

We have got to change the conversation from talking about ‘the elderly’ and ‘the disabled’ to talking about people who are elderly and people with disabilities. When you take away that little ‘the’ … they become individuals with stories. Putting the ‘the’ in front of it makes them objects and objectifies them; dare I say, it makes them subhuman.

Ortiz said she has experienced the reality of the “disabled” label.

Advocates of physician-assisted suicide think that my life isn't worth living…that is not acceptable to me — Melissa Ortiz pic.twitter.com/CtcuhXYvAc

— Kathryn Jean Lopez (@kathrynlopez) February 27, 2017

“I cannot tell you the number of times that people have addressed [my husband] to ask what I would like,” she said. “And before that they would ask my mother or my friends, because I couldn’t possibly answer for myself because I am in a wheelchair.”

Ortiz said her family also was faced with a situation with a loved one where caring action made all the difference.

Her father-in-law battled prostate cancer, which spread to the bone, and did not have “great doctors,” she said:

I fired all the doctors and got him much better care … and he was with us for … 12 years after that. He would have missed knowing his only grandchild, and his only grandchild would have missed knowing him.

Suffering and illness, Ortiz said, can be a way to “walk in victory”:

Suffering, internal illness is not always about us as individuals, the person doing the suffering. It is about the people around us and learning to walk out that suffering, not looking for a way to get out, but looking for a way to walk in victory.

Kathleen Buckley Domingo, also on the panel and associate director for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles Life Ministry, said she is alarmed at how physician-assisted suicide has been handled in her state.

Thanks to everyone who participated in doctor-prescribed suicide discussions in DC today @NR_Institute @Heritage @CICDC pic.twitter.com/NlutKEMwiG

— Kathryn Jean Lopez (@kathrynlopez) February 28, 2017

Physician-assisted suicide became legal in California on June 9, 2016.

“We do not know how many people have taken advantage of assisted suicide because we are not allowed to know how many people have taken advantage,” Domingo said. “There is no tracking system that is open to any kind of public scrutiny at all.”

Physician-assisted also includes a significant amount of unknowns, Domingo said.

“What happens if you change your mind? What happens if you change your mind and then become incompetent and someone else in the house still thinks it is a good idea? These are very real situations that real families in California are right now facing,” she said.

Supporters of physician-assisted suicide, including Compassion & Choices, an organization advocating its legalization across the nation, argue that terminally ill individuals should have the choice to “end their suffering if it becomes intolerable.”

Donovan said choosing death by opting for assisted suicide may be the least expensive path to take, but is dangerous for patients and physicians.

“In medicine we know that what is permissible becomes habitual, and what is habitual becomes standard care, and what is [the] standard of care becomes obligatory,” Donovan said. “We will be changing the standards of care for all physicians and all patients by changing this law for society and the profession.” (For more from the author of “Assisted Suicide Dehumanizes Suffering, Opponents Argue” please click HERE)

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While the nation’s attention has been squarely on President-elect Donald Trump’s win in recent weeks, election night also saw several significant losses for conservatives.

Among these is Colorado’s Proposition 106, known as the End of Life Options Act, which passed by an astounding two-thirds percentage and effectively legalized suicide in that state.

Proposition 106 signals a stark shift in the cultural and legal landscape in one of the nation’s most purple states. Colorado became one of the first two states to legalize marijuana in 2012, and over the past four years, it has been one of the top two states in receiving an influx of young professionals under 40.

Even though local mainstream media and editorial opinions that are not typically conservative came out strongly against the measure, it still passed at the ballot box.

Proposition 106 was carried forward on a palpable cultural perception of “freedom” that is now markedly different from traditional conservative definitions of liberty, which had shaped red states in elections past.

Conservatives and certainly our Founders recognized that liberty is the self-governing right to live and therefore act freely within certain universal moral parameters. But that orthodoxy is now shifting.

Our culture now largely perceives the liberal contention that freedom is the universal ability to live and therefore act outside of any presupposed moral construct.

Freedom, the 2016 progressive agenda says, is not just my right to believe anything, but also my “right” to do literally anything I please, so long as I personally believe my actions are valid.

The year 2016 saw this leap from belief to action (the natural consequence of beliefs) on a bigger scale than arguably any prior year in American history.

From the Obama transgender mandate that told educational institutions they had to allow the supposed “freedom” to act incongruently with one’s actual gender to the rising acceptance of legalized marijuana, the cultural mandate is asserting that freedom means action without moral restraint.

The right to believe whatever one chooses, particularly in a religious context, is a hallmark of American jurisprudence. But even the Supreme Court has never stated that a person has the liberty to act however he or she chooses. Actions are always governed by the rule of law, and this orthodoxy is consistent with American principles of liberty and freedom.

But assisted suicide—the action of deliberately ending one’s own life—quietly became law amid this wave of redefined freedom. The culture is now asserting unrestrained self-identity and unrestricted freedom nonsense, as well as the liberal notion that every person should be “free” to subjectively self-identify his or her own quality of life, even to his or her own objective detriment.

This is not legitimate freedom or liberty. This is redefining the value Americans have always placed on genuine freedom and liberty. Once we frame liberty with a broad brush that any action—even self-selected suicide—is permissible, we lose the true moral definition of freedom, and perhaps we lose freedom altogether.

While Colorado is not the first state to pass assisted suicide (as of 2016, five states have legalized assisted death), Proposition 106 does not place any restrictions or safeguards against “doctor shopping” or encouraging insurance companies (who could providing kickback incentives to doctors) to push cost-effective provisions in aiding dying rather than costly lifelong medical care.

Once the law grants this “freedom” to subjectively choose the value of one’s life and when it should end, the law becomes meaningless to restrain certain harmful acts and to protect people from those acts.

The rule of law has always been used to impose morality upon society and the individual, under the basic premise that certain actions are universally wrong and harmful to society. This is why we have a criminal code that prohibits certain behaviors, which is society’s expression of objective values and morality.

When the law fails to serve as the civil mechanism for preserving and protecting true liberty through moral restraint, the law then loses this inherent legitimacy and important governmental function.

The Founders recognized in the Declaration of Independence that objective truth exists, and that fundamental human rights (including life and liberty) come from an objective source—our creator. Assisted death expressly contradicts this truth by giving people the ability to subjectively determine—and fully deny—the value of their own lives.

It is often said that politics is downstream from culture, and our culture is redefining the moral virtues of freedom and liberty. Conservatives must not ignore the significant losses in 2016 (though thankfully few), but rather engage at the cultural level, while also keeping active in politics and law. (For more from the author of “Despite Conservative Victories in 2016, Assisted Suicide Has Gained Ground” please click HERE)

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Five states have legalized physician-assisted suicide—California, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and Massachusetts. If Colorado votes “yes” on Proposition 106 next week, it will become the sixth. The District of Columbia is looking to adopt similar legislation.

End of life care is deeply personal. Watching a loved one suffer is something no one ever wants to do. And if you’ve been in the position to care for someone as they lay dying, you know that you’d give anything to relieve their pain.

Needless to say, this issue is emotional. This means the common ground you find, the examples you cite, and the words you use matter a lot. Your goal isn’t to present a dry, emotionless argument, but to tread lightly with the right emotion.

Here is how to do just that and call out the “death with dignity” and “right to die” movements for what they are.

Common Ground

The common ground in this argument seems obvious—no one wants to suffer, and no one wants to watch other people suffer.

You see a toddler fall and scrape his knee and you immediately want to comfort him.

You watch a friend care for her dying husband and you want to alleviate both her pain as the caretaker and his pain as the terminally ill.

Though it seems obvious that suffering is never anyone’s goal, it’s important to state it. If you start rattling off statistics without first establishing your motivation, you risk allowing the person on the other end of your conversation to assume the worst.

Instead, reiterate that suffering is painful, and messy, and hard, both for the one experiencing it and their loved ones. We should be looking to innovative medical care and better hospice treatment to manage pain at all price points.

It’s the working out of this desire to its logical conclusion that calls for discussion.

Examples

The best way to communicate your position on a sensitive issue is to use examples and anecdotes, and highlight the consequences not widely reported in the mainstream media.

A terminally ill patient in a state with physician-assisted suicide says she received a letter from her insurance company explaining that it’s cheaper to cover the medication to end her life than purchasing the medication to ease symptoms.

In other words, your chemotherapy is more expensive than this pill to end your life, so we can no longer cover your chemotherapy treatment. This is a scary reality, especially as the government becomes more involved.

If you want to use the power of a story, it’s worth citing J.J. Hanson’s experience (as covered by The Daily Signal a few weeks ago).

Hanson is a veteran and brain cancer survivor. He was initially told he had only four months to live, which made him eligible for physician-assisted suicide. But Hanson, who sought additional medical opinions, is still alive more than two years after that diagnosis and speaks out against physician-assisted suicide.

Physician-assisted suicide is also an issue for the most vulnerable among us. Think the elderly and disabled.

The Daily Signal reported on Friday that “evidence from the Netherlands, where physician-assisted suicide has been legal for years, suggests that many instances of physician-assisted suicide there were nonvoluntary. It is the marginalized who are most vulnerable to being pressured, tricked, or coerced into killing themselves.”

Physician-assisted suicide allows a medical professional you don’t know (and who doesn’t know you) to decide if your life is worth living. Advocates will argue that there are rules in place—18 years old, mentally fit, less than six months to live—to prevent coercion. But the possibility remains, and studies show otherwise.

Last, it may be helpful to note the implication for doctors and religious liberty. If you’re practicing medicine in a state with physician-assisted suicide and your faith instructs you not to take a life, is your job in jeopardy if you refuse a patient their right to die? Possibly.

Words

There are a lot of euphemisms thrown around when people discuss physician-assisted suicide—“death with dignity,” “aid in dying,” “right to die.”

These phrases make it seem impossible for anyone to disagree with legislation that seeks to promote an end to suffering via “death with dignity.” But talk about the disabled as people who “live with dignity” and explain that those suffering with a terminal illness still have the “right to live.”

Remember: There is a lot of emotion on either side of this argument, so find that common ground and use it to your benefit before launching into examples and statistics.

Don’t shy away from reclaiming the words and phrases the other side likes to use. They may cite “death with dignity” as void of suffering, but there is a case to be made to the contrary. (For more from the author “Tackling the Claims of ‘Right to Die'” please click HERE)

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