To the Members of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee. All of the following phrases will seem familiar because they were all heard in the discussion of this bill during the past few weeks.
- 2 doctors have to determine if the patient meets the medical criteria
- This bill is narrowly constructed
- There are guardrails and safeguards in place
- This is a decision between a patient and their doctor.
These phrases should also be familiar because they mirror almost word-for-word phrases used to describe abortion in the US in the early days of legalization. Originally, two doctors had to verify that the abortion was medically necessary. These were the hard cases – life of the mother, rape, incest, fatal fetal anomaly. Those doctors were the safeguards. Later, the list expanded from life of the mother to life and health of the mother, from other medical issues to no medical issues to no reason at all. It ceased being a decision between a woman and her doctor and became abortion on demand. At the same time, the number of abortions exploded from 616,000 in 1973 to close to 1.5 million in 1990. Even today, the number is more than a half million a year.
We want to thank Rep. Margaret Drye for this Contribution – Please direct yours to Steve@GraniteGrok.com.
You can review our ‘Op-Ed Guidelines‘ on the FAQ Page.
We don’t need to look at Canada – where medical aid in dying went from applying to the seriously ill who would be dying soon to applying to those for whom death was not considered reasonably foreseeable to applying to those suffering solely from mental illness, all in the space of the seven years from 2016 to 2023 – to see how this can expand. We need only to look at our own history of abortion.
In the testimony on this bill, you’ll hear about the hard cases that probably fit today’s guardrails. But, as we have seen in both Canada and the US, things that fit today’s guardrails can easily go off the rails. Let’s not give Medical Aid In Dying a chance to do that. Let’s learn not from hypothetical slippery slopes but from actual history and vote HB1283 Inexpedient to Legislate.
