On Monday, May 19, 2025, Dilbert creator Scott Adams announced via his podcast that he is dying from metastatic prostate cancer that has spread to his bones. He suspects he has only months to live. He also announced his plans to avail himself of California’s End-of-Life Options Act that passed in 2016. At some point, presumably when the pain which is already significant becomes intolerable, Adams plans to drink a juice cocktail that will end his life. He acknowledges having worked for the passage of the suicide bill.
For the many Americans who have been educated and delighted by Adams through both his podcasts and Dilbert comic strips, this announcement was both shocking and painful. For Christians who love Adams, the pain is intensified by the knowledge that Adams is not a Christian. He is agnostic on whether God exists. His lack of a theologically orthodox view of God, Jesus, and man surely influences his support for physician-assisted killing.
Illinois leftists, always in ideological lockstep with California leftists, are pushing hard to legalize physician-assisted killing. If there’s one thing leftists love, it’s killing humans.
Democrats in the Illinois House and Senate have proposed matching bills (HB1328) (SB0009) with the exact cunningly benign title of the California law: End-of-Life Options Act.
Not only do the Illinois bills studiously avoid using the word “suicide” to describe the legalization of suicide, but they go one step further by including this in the bill:
Death in accordance with this act shall not be designated a suicide or homicide.
Ingesting chemicals to kill oneself is definitely not suicide in the minds of suicide-fanatics.
If passed the bill would permit physicians to prescribe “aid-in-dying medication.” The term “medication” is not merely a euphemism; it’s a lie. “Medication” denotes a “drug or other agent used to treat disease or injury,” or “any drug or preparation used for the treatment or prevention of disease.” Prescribing drugs to kill sick people is neither disease treatment nor disease prevention.
Weaselly leftists use weasel language to conceal truth in service of their culture-killing ends. Remember when they said they wanted abortion to be safe, legal, and rare? Now they want abortion legal through all nine months of pregnancy for any or no reason, and they gleefully shout their abortions. There is no truth in leftists.
Illinois leftists have added procedures to the bill ostensibly to prevent abuse of the suicide mechanism and included a boatload of protections for the physicians hired to kill their patients.
Anyone who has followed the suicide trajectory in those states and countries that have legalized physician-assisted suicide know that the “right” to commit suicide with the help of “health care” providers expands.
First, the terminally ill like Scott Adams avail themselves of the option. Then the elderly, disabled, and mentally ill will choose or feel pressured to choose suicide. And that’s okay with leftists whose supreme values are absolute, unfettered autonomy and consent.
The icy slope of suicide rationalization terminates in the redefinition of suicide as a fundamental right. Writing in Human Life Review, Wesley J. Smith warns,
A recent ruling from Germany’s highest court … conjured a fundamental right both to commit suicide and to receive assistance in doing it. Moreover, the decision explicitly rejected limiting the right to people diagnosed with illnesses or disabilities. As a matter of protecting “the right of personality,” the court decreed that “self-determined death” is a virtually unlimited fundamental liberty that the government must guarantee to protect “autonomy.” In other words, the German people now have the right to kill themselves at any time and for any reason—and receive help from anyone in doing it.
In marshalling arguments to defend physician complicity in human killing, leftists have claimed that legalizing such practices will reduce the “number of total suicide rates (i.e. including assisted suicides).” Like so many other leftist claims, this has turned out to be false.
In an April 2022 column, researchers David Paton and Sourafel Girma assert that
There is very strong evidence that the legalisation of assisted suicide is associated with a significant increase in total suicides. Further, the increase is observed most strongly for the over-64s and for women.
Researchers Silvia Sara Canetto and John L. McIntosh suggest that the increased rate of suicide among women may “reflect the disempowerment of those who are more vulnerable to social pressure to die by suicide … and … women are overrepresented in such groups.”
If Illinois passes this bill and Governor Gruesome signs it into law, it is only a matter of time before Springfield leftists seek to amend it to allow anyone with a death wish to be aided and abetted by those for whom the Hippocratic Oath means nothing.
The next step after that will be increasing pressure on those viewed as a burden and expense to do the sacrificial thing and go gently into the night. One day, a depressed 19-year-old will commit suicide, and her parents will have no legal recourse for holding the killer responsible.
This is not an abstract debate for me. Seventeen months ago my husband, who had Parkinson’s disease when he was diagnosed with a rare, incurable aggressive cancer that had metastasized to his lungs by the time of diagnosis, died. At the same time one of our children was battling cancer. She’s still in the battle, and it’s brutal. I’m thankful that there was and is no legal option for them to hire someone to kill them.
A secular society, an anti-Christian society, a utilitarian society obsessed with comfort and pleasure doesn’t value those seen as weak and “useless” among us, those whose care is financially and emotionally costly. We know that from the lust for abortion, from the warehousing of infirm parents and grandparents, and from the anti-natalist views that led Guy Edward Bartkus to bomb a fertility clinic. A society fit for human flourishing stands steadfastly for the inherent worth of all lives.
Politicians—particularly Democrat politicians—bankrupt the state (and country), and then Democrats socially construct a way of disposing of costly terminally ill patients. That’s Democrat “compassion.”
Contact your lawmakers, and pray for Scott Adams.