Delaware assisted-suicide law promotes 'death culture,' attacks life's sanctity and medical ethics



Delaware Governor Matt Meyer, a Democrat, stated that he was "proud" to legalize physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients.

Meyer signed House Bill 140 into law on Tuesday, amending Delaware's code concerning end-of-life options and making it the 11th state in the nation to legalize assisted suicide in certain situations.

'It turns the tools of healing into lethal weapons.'

The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Eric Morrison (D), permits mentally capable adults diagnosed with a terminal illness to opt for physician-assisted suicide if they are given only six months or less to live. It requires that those considering the life-terminating option be presented with alternative options, such as comfort care, palliative care, hospice, and pain control. Additionally, the law first requires two waiting periods and a second medical opinion on the patient's prognosis.

The bill reads, "This Act permits a terminally ill individual who is an adult resident of Delaware to request and self-administer medication to end the individual's life in a humane and dignified manner if both the individual's attending physician or attending advanced practice registered nurse (APRN) and a consulting physician or consulting APRN agree on the individual's diagnosis and prognosis and believe the individual has decision-making capacity, is making an informed decision, and is acting voluntarily."

RELATED: More women seeking elective, government-assisted suicide than men, as euthanasia in Canada rises 16% in 1 year

Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images

Upon signing the bill into law on Tuesday, Meyer claimed it advanced "compassion."

"We're acknowledging today that even in the last moments of life, compassion matters," he stated. "Every Delawarean should have the right to face their final chapter with peace, dignity, and control."

"This signing today is about relieving suffering and giving families the comfort of knowing that their loved one was able to pass on their own terms, without unnecessary pain, and surrounded by the people they love most," Meyer said. "It gives people facing unimaginable suffering the ability to choose peace and comfort, surrounded by those they love. After years of debate, I am proud to sign HB 140 into law."

Delaware lawmakers shot down the measure last year.

California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and Washington, D.C., have similar laws.

Delaware's End-of-Life Options Act will go into effect next year.

RELATED: England legalizes assisted suicide — former prime minister says government abuse will be prevented

Photo by SIMON WOHLFAHRT/AFP via Getty Images

Paul Dupont, the policy director at the American Principles Project, told Blaze News that Delaware's new law signals a "troubling trend."

"Delaware becoming the 11th state to legalize physician-assisted suicide is a symptom of the troubling trend in our culture that continues to devalue life to the point of promoting death as a solution to suffering. It undermines the dignity of every person and creates an environment where the elderly, disabled, and marginalized feel their lives are burdens," Dupont said.

He added, "Instead of allowing this 'death culture' to take over our country, states need to pass pro-life and pro-family legislation that affirms the worth of every individual to counter these harmful policies."

Ryan T. Anderson with the Ethics and Public Policy Center argued that physician-assisted suicide "violates the fundamental principles of medical care."

Anderson told Blaze News, "It turns the tools of healing into lethal weapons. And it threatens to fundamentally distort the doctor-patient relationship because it reduces patients' trust in doctors and doctors' undivided commitment to the life and health of their patients."

"The 'option' of physician-assisted suicide provides perverse incentives for insurance providers — public and private," he continued. "It offers a quick way to cut costs in a world of increasingly scarce health care resources. And it's the weak and vulnerable and marginalized who will be most at risk in a culture in which assisted suicide is permitted."

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Walmart, Canada, and the great DEI retreat: Are we finally waking up?



Is freedom retreating, or is freedom advancing? Just a few weeks ago, I would have said that it is retreating. But something is changing, and America — though bruised and battered — is leading the way back.

When everything went wrong for us during the past four years — when we felt like freedom was on the brink — what did we do? We didn’t scream at the waves like a group of liberal women in New York City did. We didn’t take to Instagram and post videos of ourselves bawling and distraught. We went to work. We went to God. And we remembered who we are.

They’re losing. The resistance is running out of steam. Common sense is creeping back in.

Bible sales in America are up 21% over the last year. In times of uncertainty, we’ve always turned back to faith, to principles that give us balance and resolve. For those on the left, their “god” is the government, DEI initiatives, and utopian ideals. But when those false gods fail — as they always do — they’re left with nothing but despair.

The pushback against tyranny

But something remarkable is happening: Freedom is pushing back. Not just here, but around the globe.

Take Canada, for example, a country that seemed hopelessly lost to the suffocating grip of DEI and government overreach. Just last year, one in every 20 deaths in Canada was due to assisted suicide. A government that once promised freedom, opportunity, and optimism is now expediting death.

Remember when Canadian officials froze the bank accounts of citizens supporting the trucker protests? The government turned on its own people, and trust was shattered.

But now, even in Canada, people are saying enough is enough. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, once untouchable, is teetering on the brink. His allies are abandoning him. His control is slipping. The tide is turning.

America leading the charge

In America, we’ve been dangerously close to losing our understanding of freedom. We blurred the lines between equality and equity. Equality means judging people by their character, their merit, their skills. Equity demands that we look at race, history, and grievances instead.

Walmart, once a proud torchbearer of DEI initiatives, is now quietly rolling those initiatives back. Why? Not out of fear of Trump, as some claim, but because the public has spoken. Americans are remembering what fairness and opportunity look like. Businesses are realizing that serving customers — not political agendas — should be their priority.

The media, once the powerful arm of the progressive agenda, is losing its grip. Like the armless, legless knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” they’re still yelling, still swinging, but the fight’s over. They just don’t know it yet.

Now comes the hard work

The 2024 election was indeed a victory, but it was also a reprieve. God, in His mercy, gave us time — time to reclaim the freedom that was being extinguished over the past four years. The question is: What are we going to do with this second chance?

We need to organize. We need to vote. We need to hold leaders accountable, not just with our voices, but with our actions, our wallets, and our resolve. The left’s relentless pursuit to erode freedom isn’t going to stop. They won’t give up easily.

But they’re losing. The resistance is running out of steam. Restaurants that once celebrated refusing service to Trump officials are now firing employees who pull the same stunts. Common sense is creeping back in.

We stand at a crossroads. Freedom isn’t an automatic guarantee. It must be fought for, defended, and cherished. As a wise man once said, “Always give the American people the benefit of the doubt. They’ll get it wrong, but eventually, they’ll figure it out and get it right.” That’s correct. We are figuring it out. Slowly, painfully, but surely.

It’s time to choose. Will we seize this moment or let it slip away?

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More women seeking elective, government-assisted suicide than men, as euthanasia in Canada rises 16% in 1 year



More women than men sought out assisted suicide even when their death was deemed not to be reasonably foreseeable, a recent report stated.

A document on government-assisted suicide in Canada has revealed a 15.8% increase in euthanasia, year over year.

Medical Assistance in Dying, known as MAID, has become one of the leading causes of death in Canada since being legalized in 2016.

'It is not yet possible to make reliable conclusions.'

The federal government of Canada has since announced that in 2023, there were a total of 15,343 people who were killed by the state. Additionally, over 2,900 people died before they received the government service, while 915 requests were deemed ineligible, and nearly 500 people withdrew their request during processing.

This near-16% increase showed a decline from the 31% growth the program had seen between 2019 and 2022. However, the government document admitted, "It is not yet possible to make reliable conclusions about whether or not these findings represent a stabilization of growth rates over the longer term."

There also exists unanswered questions regarding the demographics of who is seeking state-sanctioned suicide.

Assisted suicide categories

Under the government program, suicide requests are separated into two different "tracks."

"Track 1" refers to those who meet the eligibility criteria set out by the government and are deemed as having a natural death that is "reasonably foreseeable."

Patients are put in "Track 2" when they meet the eligibility criteria set out by the government but are deemed not to have a "reasonably foreseeable" natural death.

Track 2 made up 4.1% of the assisted deaths in 2023, equating to 622 people who received help from the government to die even though their death was unlikely to happen otherwise.

Women were overrepresented in this category at a rate of nearly six out of 10 (58.5%), despite men being the majority of those who have MAID requests overall (51.2%).

Additionally, over 11% of the Track 2 patients — those without a foreseeable death — are below the age of 50, representing about 70 people in 2023.

For Track 1, 13.9% of MAID recipients are under 65 years old, which represents over 2,000 younger people who were deemed terminally ill.

Canada's rules for MAID eligibility require recipients to be over 18 years old and be "mentally competent."

This age requirement is not matched in every country, especially the Netherlands, where assisted suicide eligibility extends to infants as well. Terminally ill children aged 1-12 can be killed by the state in that country.

“The end of life for this group is the only reasonable alternative to the child’s unbearable and hopeless suffering,” the Dutch government said in 2023, per the Guardian.

In 2002, the Netherlands became the first country to legalize euthanasia nationally, and in 2014, Belgium became the first country to allow children to kill themselves.

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The U.K. Takes Another Step Toward State-Sponsored Euthanasia

Members of Parliament need to come to their senses and reject the assisted suicide measure before it makes it into the statute books.

When a theologian's damning prediction comes true almost 100 years early



Anti-Christian antagonists love to define Christians by what they think Christianity stands against. But Christians must define themselves by what they stand for.

Now is an especially important time to remember this axiom.

As Americans celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday last week, its geopolitical cousins in Britain crossed the Rubicon and embraced death, legalizing so-called "assisted suicide" in England and Wales. Now, Britons over 18 who have been diagnosed with a "terminal illness" and supposedly have fewer than six months to live can receive approval from two physicians and a judge to self-administer fatal drugs.

Supporters of assisted suicide argue it is a compassionate means of ending suffering. One British lawmaker, Peter Prinsley of the Labour Party, claimed in support of the bill, "We are shortening death, not life, for our patients. This is not life or death; this is death or death."

(Let it not be lost on the reader that this justification serves to lessen the now-deceased's burden on Britain's welfare state and its National Health Service.)

The death culture that celebrates "assisted suicide" has succeeded in Western culture because we have eroded, in the view of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler Jr., "moral absolutes [that] rest on explicitly Christian foundations."

In a world that increasingly prescribes death for the undesirables — the unborn, the sick, the elderly — Christians must hold true to their core value of protecting life.

In this context, the most important moral absolute is that each and every human being is intrinsically valuable because humans are the Imago Dei, created in the image and likeness of God, the author of life.

"A society that honors this foundational truth could not contemplate the subversion of human life and human dignity by assisted suicide. A society that denies this essential truth will eventually rationalize anything, given time and motivation," Mohler observes.

When the moral absolute of the Imago Dei is discarded, no longer does a terminally ill person have value, and no longer do humans limit the power of giving and taking life to God. In such cultures, the state becomes like God, determining whose live is valuable and whose life is worth preserving.

In 2012, theologian Stanley Hauerwas offered a prediction about Christians and the culture of death that turned out to be extremely prescient.

He said:

I say in a hundred years, if Christians are known as a strange group of people who don’t kill their children and don’t kill the elderly, we will have done a great thing. I mean, that may not sound like much, but I think it is the ultimate politic. I mean, if we can just be a disciplined enough community, who through the worship of God has discovered that we are ready to be hospitable to new life and life that is suffering, then, as a matter of fact, that is a political alternative that otherwise the world will not have.

This, of course, is something that Christians have always done.

Christians cared for the widows and the orphans. Christians cared for the sick. Christians cared for the unwanted children. Christians cared for those whom society deemed as burdens. Christians essentially invented the hospital. Christianity accommodates all human life because every life is inherently valuable.

In a world that increasingly prescribes death for the undesirables — the unborn, the sick, the elderly — Christians must hold true to their core value of protecting life. Put simply: Caring for the vulnerable and protecting life is who Christians are; it's core to the Christian identity.

Christianity's institutionalized charity transformed the ancient world, and it can renew ours.

In a culture that celebrates death, Christians must be the strange group of people who stand for life — no matter the cost.

May Christians continue to be — as they have always been — in the words of Hauerwas, "the political alternative" this world otherwise does not have.

Canada’s ‘Doctor Death’ Has Killed Hundreds Of Patients And Counting

[rebelmouse-proxy-image https://thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Screenshot-2024-12-04-at-5.05.05 PM-1200x675.png crop_info="%7B%22image%22%3A%20%22https%3A//thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Screenshot-2024-12-04-at-5.05.05%5Cu202fPM-1200x675.png%22%7D" expand=1]One doctor has murdered more than 430 patients — not counting unborn babies. She is still practicing this twisted 'medicine.'

England legalizes assisted suicide — former prime minister says government abuse will be prevented



Members of Parliament have voted to pass legislation that makes assisted suicide legal in England and Wales.

The new legislation will allow for the death of those in the two countries who are over the age of 18 and are registered with a general practitioner for at least 12 months.

The bill passed with a vote of 330 to 275 and will allow patients to expect to be killed within six months of their request.

'As a religious person, I understand and appreciate the deep moral and philosophical concerns that many people have about this issue.'

Other parameters, the BBC reported, included making sure the patient has the mental capacity to make the decision in a clear, settled, and informed manner that is free from coercion.

Two separate declarations must be made by the patient, with two "independent doctors" declaring the patient is eligible at least seven days apart.

Additionally, a High Court judge would have to rule each time a person makes a request to die, after which the patient has to wait another 14 days after the ruling to reflect on whether they want the government to kill them.

A doctor would reportedly prepare a substance that would kill the patient, but the patient has to ingest the substance themselves.

Conservative former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wrote in the Darlington and Stockton Times that he agrees with the decision and voted in favor of it.

The "bill is sufficiently tightly drawn to prevent" abuse of the law by the government, Sunak wrote. "Pressuring someone into ending their life will be a criminal offence."

He added, "As a religious person, I understand and appreciate the deep moral and philosophical concerns that many people have about this issue."

Blaze News previously reported on the rise of government-assisted suicide across the world.

In the United States, euthanasia was first made legal in Oregon in 1997. California, Vermont, and Washington have also approved the death method, but it is not federally legalized.

Australia, Belgium, Canada, Ecuador, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland have all legalized assisted suicide. Switzerland has made headlines as of late due to an ongoing debate and investigation surrounding the use of suicide pods in the country.

In the Netherlands, assisted suicide is allowed for terminally ill children ages 1-12. Those who are 5-10 years old can be killed if they are determined to be suffering unbearably or have no hope of improvement.

“The end of life for this group is the only reasonable alternative to the child’s unbearable and hopeless suffering,” the government said in 2023, per the Guardian.

Canada, which boasts a robust suicide system, paused its program for those who are mentally ill in February 2024. In August, state-facilitated suicide was the leading cause of death in Canada.

In November 2011, Russia passed a law banning euthanasia, making it the only country in the world in which all forms of euthanasia are illegal.

As for the English and Welsh legislation, it will be illegal to use dishonesty, pressure, or coercion to encourage someone to end their life, with a 14-year prison sentence for those found guilty of doing so. It is unclear how that would be determined.

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