The Peru Gazette

The State of New York will help its citizens kill themselves beginning today.” ‘No amount of clinical language — ‘medical aid in dying,’ ‘end-of-life option,’ ‘compassionate care’ — changes what this law is: state-sanctioned assisted suicide. The Conservative Party will take no pleasure in saying we told you so as New York continues down this nihilistic path. “Canada legalized assisted death in 2016 for the terminally ill; within five years it expanded to those whose deaths were not ‘reasonably foreseeable.’ Canadian lawmakers are openly debating extending it to the mentally ill. In the Netherlands and Belgium, eligibility has crept from terminal illness to psychiatric suffering to children. In every jurisdiction that has adopted assisted suicide, the ‘strict safeguards’ of year one become the ‘barriers to access’ of year 10. There is no example — anywhere — of these laws contracting. They only expand. “Governor Kathy Hochul assures New Yorkers that the checks and balances she signed into law — a six-month prognosis, two physicians, a five-day waiting period, a recorded request — will protect the vulnerable. But those safeguards cannot survive the moral inconsistency at the heart of this law. New York spends millions on suicide prevention hotlines while its Health Department now issues guidance on suicide facilitation. We tell the healthy young person in despair that his life has inherent worth, and we tell the sick elderly person in despair that ending hers is a dignified choice. A state cannot hold both positions. One of them will give way. “The pressure this law places on society’s most vulnerable — the elderly, the disabled, the poor, those who fear being a ‘burden’ on their families — is not hypothetical. It is documented in every jurisdiction that has preceded us down this path. A right to die becomes, quietly and inevitably, a duty to die. “True compassion is presence, palliative care, and hospice — not a deadly prescription and a hastened goodbye. The Conservative Party stood against this law, we stand against it today, and we will stand with every New Yorker whose life the State of New York has just declared negotiable.”