Richard Doerflinger, M.A.

On March 8, 2023, Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) introduced the latest version of the pro-abortion “Women’s Health Protection Act” (S. 701).

On February 27, the Washington state senate decided to subject many more of its residents to the risk of being hastened toward death by drug overdose.

Beginning with Oregon in 1997, ten states and the District of Columbia have legalized physician-assisted suicide (PAS) for patients said to have a terminal illness.

The Administration policy is unsupported by the language and history of EMTALA itself, and explicitly forbidden by other equally authoritative federal laws.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey has led abortion supporters to propose sweeping legislation, and to mislead Americans about pro-life legislation. One example is a claim, repeated by many news outlets, that state laws against abortion forbid effective treatment of women undergoing miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies. That claim has been rebutted again and again, but continues to appear in online news outlets.

The “Women’s Health Protection Act” (WHPA) has been circulating in Congress since 2013. That is the year Planned Parenthood announced it was moving away from the slogan “pro-choice.”

Opponents of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) have long warned that there is a “slippery slope” from initially limited acceptance of the practice to a broader “right” to take the lives of the sick and elderly. PAS supporters have generally dismissed this claim as alarmist. In my home state of Washington, however, supporters are now embracing the claim, and urging lawmakers to ski down the slope.

Former vice-president Joseph Biden has made it clear that on becoming President, he hopes to advance his party’s stand on so-called “social issues” such as abortion and the LGBTQ agenda. His ability to do so will depend on whether he will be working with a Congress that shares his goals.

In August, the Trump administration’s new Human Fetal Tissue Research Ethics Advisory Board reviewed requests made to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for federally funded fetal tissue research. The Board recommended denying most of these requests.

The founding intentions of the PAS movement, the grim practical realities of suicide by oral overdose, the legal principles at stake, and the state of public opinion all argue that the move from PAS to euthanasia, once the former is more widely accepted, would be not only a “slippery slope” but a virtual free fall.