The latest out of Springfield: The sponsor of the assisted suicide bill in the Illinois House, Representative Robyn Gabel (D-Chicago), has attached her proposal to SB 1950 in Amendment 2. This bill has already passed the Illinois Senate and is now before the Illinois House. This will allow members of the House to pass the amended bill, and then members of the Senate need only to concur. It is a devious way to ram the bill through the General Assembly before the session ends on May 31st.
This legislation would allow people who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness and whose physicians believe that they have six months or less to live to obtain lethal drugs by prescription and self-administer those drugs.
Among those who oppose this bill, the top concerns include:
- No doctor has a crystal ball. An assisted suicide law could cause patients to take their lives based on inaccurate predictions about their life expectancies.
- Legalizing assisted suicide would create a culture in which terminally-ill persons believe that they have a “duty to die.”
- Assisted suicide would give insurers—whether state-run or private—a financial incentive to cover lethal drugs, but not costly life-saving treatments. No one should feel pressured into choosing assisted suicide for financial reasons, or because they fear becoming a burden upon others close to them.
As a pro-life organization, Illinois Family Institute is highly invested in preventing this bill from becoming law. Now is the time to take action!
Take ACTION: Click HERE to email both your state senator and state representative. Remind them that the medical community opposes aiding and abetting the death of a patient. Respectfully tell your state senator that Illinois should never legalize, sanction, or normalize suicide. Public policy should seek to improve healthcare and protect the vulnerable, not commend death.
Legislation like this paints the wrong picture of human life, as it implies people are burdens and that there are instances when life is not worth living. They say to the sick and their families that the precious months or days they have left do not matter, that they should “hurry up and get death over with,” and that nothing good can come through suffering.
IFI Board Member Dr. Mark Zumhagen, MD, has rightly pointed out that allowing assisted suicide will create an expectation:
Allowing doctors to be in charge of executing patients will quickly bring about a change from a ‘right to die’ to a ‘duty to die.’ This is an egregious violation of the original Hippocratic oath and more significantly a violation of the sixth commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ one of the foundational pillars of western civilization.
Assisted suicide represents a complete abdication of our moral responsibility to people who are suffering from terminal illness. Rather than caring for these fellow image-bearers with the utmost sensitivity and compassion, the sponsors of these bills would have us simply expedite their demise. Illinois should not be known as the state that kills in the womb AND before the tomb.
There are many serious problems with this agenda. As Bible-believing Christians, we understand that Scripture teaches us God is the Author of life — the inherent worth of every human life is rooted in the reality that each person is created in the image of God. This value is not contingent on an individual’s perceived autonomy, contribution to society, or physical or mental capacity; it is rooted in the fundamental truth of Scripture, which teaches that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139).
This Memorial Day Weekend, if you can do one thing concerning this matter today, please email or leave a short voice message for your state legislators about this dangerous bill.
