George Will uses sad stories to take aim at Connecticut.
Check out my letter to the editor at the Waterbury Republican-American responding to national conservative columnist, George Will. George Will has predictably joined forces again with Soros-funded assisted suicide advocates to drive policy changes with emotional, heavy-handed stories of people at the end of life. Basically using those stories – one from a state where assisted suicide is already legal! – to scare and shame people into supporting more assisted suicide. Shame on him, as he ignores how assisted suicide will re-shape our medical care system from one that presumes a desire for natural life, into one where for the most vulnerable (people with a disability and the elderly) will be baited to escape with lethal (yet disgusting and not always painless) oral drugs.
Doctors are already there. According to a February, 2021 article in Health Affairs, a “survey of 714 practicing US physicians nationwide, 82.4 percent reported that people with significant disability have worse quality of life than nondisabled people”. Bias and ableism in the medical community are unavoidable and while Mr. Will from his cozy Washington D.C. suburb may think the risks for other people are acceptable, we continue to think it is not.
And when Mr. Will uses people with a biblical perspective as a foil to dismiss arguments against assisted suicide, he joins the rest of Big Media to ignore the legion of people-with-disabilities, the elderly and the poor who are on the fringes of the healthcare system and society who clamor to have their perspective heard. These are the people who have the most to lose, not well-heeled advocates planning their exit-party soirées.
There are many other problems with what Mr. Will has done by focusing only on the saddest last-days-of-life cases to remove laws that have protected everyone against abuse, bias and suicide contagion. He predictably distorts polls that show support for assisted suicide. You’d think as a conservative, he’d recognize how simple polls can and are manipulated to serve a preferred narrative – well, he obviously does. I also wonder why he mocks traditionally-minded folks who oppose assisted suicide for many reasons in addition to the Bible. Our country is hungry for the Bible and we need more of it. For now, Mr. Will further jeopardizes his conservative credentials by resorting to fantasies of painless deaths, when he could be advocating for more access to end-of-life care for those who otherwise can’t afford it and for more dignity in our healthcare system for those who struggle for it. Let’s hope our legislators continue to hear the pleas of our friends in the disability community who speak much sense on this issue from a left-leaning perspective.
