Physician-assisted suicide has been a hotly debated topic across the United States for decades but a push to legalize the controversial practice in more states is picking up steam this year.
Starting with Oregon in 1997, ten other states and the District of Columbia have made it legal for terminally ill patients to ask their doctor for a lethal cocktail of drugs they ingest to die. They include California, Montana, Vermont, Washington, New Jersey, and Hawaii.
Lawmakers in ten more states have introduced physician-assisted suicide laws in 2023.
Advocates, who prefer to use the term “aid in dying” or “right to die,” say these laws restore dignity and bodily autonomy to people who are suffering.
But several concerned physicians told Fox News Digital they saw profound ethical concerns with physicians helping to end someone’s life, saying it was destructive for medicine and society at large.
Southern California primary care doctor Jeff Barke practices in a state where assisted suicide is legal and described the growing movement as a “terrible advancement” for society.
“To legislate and consecrate the idea that we purposefully expedite their death to me is not what medicine is all about, not what our healing profession is about, and is emblematic of what’s going on in our society in all aspects,” he said.
Barke noted how doctors have always been concerned about patients’ suffering and use medicine, palliative care, and hospice to ease pain and comfort their patients in end-of-life care.
The doctor, who’s also Chief Medical Advisor for the Convention of States, said he sees the movement as a cultural shift to take God out of every part of society.
“I think it’s a terrible advancement that states are legislating the rights and the power of a physician to act God-like and create and expedite a patient’s death,” he said.
In Canada, Medical Assistance in Dying (“MAID”) could expand to the mentally ill and minors under 18 years old in 2024.
Barke feared the U.S. could follow the same path.
“The line will become very blurry. At what point do we say that the doctor should be involved in death?” he posed.
These laws could put more than the terminally ill in danger, he believes.
Barke warned other laws could crop up using the same arguments advocates use about quality of life to justify killing babies born with genetic anomalies like Down Syndrome.
“Where do you draw the line? Do we want a bunch of elected officials to tell doctors, you can help kill that person but not this person?” he asked.
Furthermore, Barke argued, physicians don’t know the future, and some patients with terminal illnesses do recover.
Dr. Jeffrey Barrows knows this firsthand. The obstetrician was diagnosed with stage IV terminal cancer one year ago but is now celebrating his remission.
Barrows said he would’ve been devastated if his own doctor had recommended he end his own life in response to the diagnosis.
“Where do you draw the line? Do we want a bunch of elected officials to tell doctors, you can help kill that person but not this person?” he asked.
As Senior Vice President of Bioethics and Public Policy for Christian Medical & Dental Associations (“CMDA”), he says many doctors with ethical objections would rather quit medicine than “be complicit in the evil.”
The CMDA is a plaintiff in lawsuits against California and New Mexico filed by Alliance Defending Freedom.
The conservative legal organization says each state’s End of Life Act has language purporting to allow physicians to opt out if they have moral convictions, but a different part of the law will “explicitly require physicians to participate in the process.”
ADF counsel Chris Schandevel told Fox News Digital that they object, for instance, to forced participation under California’s law where doctors must document two oral requests from the patient to commit assisted suicide, which starts the process of the patient being able to procure the lethal dose.
Beyond protecting health care workers’ convictions, the pair said these laws’ purported safeguards do not “last or work” to protect the vulnerable either.
Schandevel said these laws put the disabled, the poor, the depressed, and the chronically sick at risk.
“Patients who would’ve chosen to live if they’d gotten the help they need for their mental health issues will die, patients who would’ve chosen to live but for the pressure from family members or caregivers will choose to die under these laws,” he claimed.
Several national disability groups are strongly opposed to assisted suicide, saying it puts the disabled at risk for “mercy killing.“
Like Barke, Schandevel pointed to Canada as a harbinger of what could come to the United States.
He referenced the Quebec College of Physicians arguing last fall to allow infants up to one year old with certain medical conditions to qualify for MAID.
The growing number of Canadians who’ve used MAID also alarms Schandevel, from about 1,000 people in 2016 to 10,000 in 2021.
Advocacy groups like Compassion & Choices say people shouldn’t have to suffer needlessly at the end of their life and physician-assisted dying laws empower them to take control of their fates.
Some physicians argue, however, that this choice is anything but compassionate.
Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care at Emory University Dr. Joel Zivot argued that advocates are not being transparent about the lack of research that’s gone into these lethal drugs.
“There’s been very little conversation and even less investigation as to how exactly the method of killing you, kills you,” the physician said to Fox News Digital.
Based on his research on autopsy reports for prisoners who received lethal injections, he said the same class of drugs from executions is also used by some U.S. states and Canada in assisted suicide and could lead to a “terribly painful kind of death.”
He compared the process to asphyxiation and the sensation of drowning.
“You can’t consent, people, if you don’t even know what the risks are of what you’re actually doing. So I think there’s been some significant dishonesty around this subject,” he said about pro-assisted suicide arguments.
“It’s marketed so successfully as if to be compassionate, yet I see a very striking lack of compassion on the part of some people who are advocating for this,” he added.
Zivot said suffering was a very serious problem that warranted attention. However, for killing to become an act of health care would cause even more problems.
“To seek death as a treatment? That’s a rewriting of thousands of years of medical practice,” he said.