West Virginia ban on assisted suicide ‘a fight worth fighting,’ state delegate says

CNA Staff, Sep 6, 2024 / 10:30 am

West Virginia Delegate Pat McGeehan, a supporter of the state’s ballot measure to make assisted suicide illegal, said in an interview with “EWTN Pro-Life Weekly” this week that he hopes the potential ban will be a “gold standard for other states to follow.”

West Virginia’s House Joint Resolution 28 received majority support in both chambers earlier this year. The measure would explicitly prohibit physicians and health care providers from participating in medically assisted suicide and euthanasia. 

Assisted suicide is legal in 10 U.S. states including Oregon, Washington, and Colorado as well as Washington, D.C.

Assisted suicide is implicitly illegal in West Virginia already as it’s considered homicide, McGeehan said on “EWTN Pro-Life Weekly” on Thursday. But the ballot measure would move to enshrine this ban in the state constitution.

“The measure is not only to protect our own state in the future,” McGeehan said. “We’re trying to use it to serve as a beacon for other states who value the preservation of life, to do so and follow in our wake.”

“If we enshrine this prohibition in the state constitution, we can establish some sort of gold standard for other states to follow, especially the red states in the Midwest, so that we can ensure that the sanctity of life is upheld across the nation,” he added. 

Physician-assisted suicide — where a doctor prescribes life-ending drugs to a patient — was first allowed in the U.S. in Oregon in 1997.

“People might not fully grasp the long-term ramifications of legalizing and institutionalizing medically assisted suicide,” McGeehan said this week. “The liberal progressive order likes to reduce morality to just consent.”

But McGeehan said that it’s hard to ensure that assisted suicide is fully voluntary. 

“Doctors hold significant authority in our society, and their suggestion of assisted suicide can heavily influence vulnerable patients and makes it hard to ensure that such a decision is ever truly voluntary to begin with,” he said. 

McGeehan noted that insurance companies and Medicaid and Medicare may cover the assisted suicide, but not the cancer treatment, to save money. 

“Once states start down this path, there’s going to be pressure from government bureaucrats placed on doctors to suggest that this is a way for patients to end their lives who might be in vulnerable situations, just like Canada’s doing,” McGeehan said. 

Legalized in 2016 in Canada, assisted suicide accounted for 4.1% of all deaths in that country in 2022. A 2024 study found that the assisted suicide program was the fifth-leading cause of death in Canada, tied with cerebrovascular diseases. 

Some states like Oregon and Vermont also offer assisted suicide to out-of-state residents in what McGeehan calls “euthanasia tourism.” 

“They have an entire market in Portland now, dedicated to these out-of-state residents coming in to kill themselves,” he said. “They have so-called death hotels and death Airbnbs, where vulnerable individuals traveling to their states to end their lives essentially die by themselves.”

McGeehan recalled a West Virginian who turned to assisted suicide, travelling to Oregon for the death prescription. 

“I had a constituent who was very depressed. He got a bad diagnosis, he could have stuck with it, and the doctors told him his cancer would go into remission, potentially in a couple of years,” McGeehan recalled. 

“But he, against my advice, traveled to Oregon, waited two weeks and got a script from the doctor who signed off on it, went down to a local pharmacy, they gave him a cocktail of poisons, just like they were giving him some sort of medicine,” he continued. “He went back to a hotel, swallowed them, and it destroyed his organs.”

McGeehan calls assisted suicide “a nihilistic trend that is sweeping the country and the Western world.”

“We cannot place decisions between who should die and who should not in the hands of politicians today,” he said. “[That] places an enormous power in the hands of government officials, and it leads to arbitrary decisions that can have devastating consequences for our society.”

“I want to get the word out there because it’s a fight worth fighting,” McGeehan added.