Illinoisans, perpetually ill-served by their Democrat public “servants,” knew this day was coming, but it’s dispiriting, nonetheless. Tomorrow, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker will sign into law the physician-assisted killing bill that legalizes the obscene act of doctors killing their patients.
Dems worked their little brain stems to a nub to socially construct a title that might convince Illinoisans that Dems genuinely want to kill only the dying: “End-of-Life Options for Terminally Ill Patients Act.” But Illinoisans are on to them. Illinoisans know Democrats are liars.
Thanks to Illinois Democrats who love killing humans like leeches love blood, Illinois now becomes the 12th state to legalize what political euphemists call “death with dignity.”
While Illinois’ law in its current form allows physicians to kill only terminally ill patients, only the terminally gullible expect that restriction to hold. There is an ineluctable trajectory, a slope so slippery that no state or country that legalizes killing will be able to keep from sliding down it. As I wrote in late October,
Doctors will soon be putting down not just terminally ill patients but elderly patients, disabled patients, chronically ill patients, and depressed patients. They will put down the old and infirm and the young and physically fit. Insurance companies will be incentivized to lean into killing as opposed to wasting all those buckets of ducats on life-sustaining palliative treatments. The elderly will be subtly pressured and not-subtly coerced into doing the selfless thing by offing themselves.
Pro-suicide, pro-physician-assisted killing advocacy groups are committed to incrementalism and tireless. Their first goal is to pass laws permitting doctors to kill just the terminally ill. Once the furor over that moral offense dies down, they will start tinkering with elements of the law like residency requirements, waiting periods, and six-month prognoses.
Next, they’ll target conditions. Leftists will ask, “Shouldn’t patients with depression, eating disorders, Parkinson’s disease, disabilities, or [that universal bugaboo] old age, be allowed the dignity of being dispatched?”
Depression, terminal illness, chronic pain, old age, or disability may rob suffers of social interaction, joy, peace, or hope. Those difficult and often tragic conditions do not, however, rob sufferers of their dignity, that is, their inherent worth. Killing them robs them of the esteem and honor they deserve.
A decent, compassionate society demonstrates esteem for those who suffer seemingly unbearable physical or mental burdens or whose life is soon to end naturally by coming alongside them—not killing them.
We spend time—a lot of time—with them, hug them and hold their hands, weep with them, laugh with them, feed them, bathe them, massage their aching limbs, turn them over to prevent pressure ulcers, watch movies with them, listen to music with them, reminisce with them, shop for and with them, and pray with and for them.
We sacrifice our time to fill their time. We get off social media, turn off our televisions, and put down our books to be with them. We don’t text them; we call them.
That’s what dignity—theirs and ours—demands.
No one is dignified by killing or being killed, both of which are acts of hubris.
Laws that permit doctors to participate in killing their patients normalize what should be unthinkable. Such laws grievously undermine the physician-patient relationship that depends on patients’ absolute trust in their doctors advice.
This macabre law is built on the assumption that some lives are unworthy of life. Doctors who participate in killing their patients necessarily affirm such an assumption. How can patients trust doctors who reject the truth that all lives have value?
Opposition to SB 1590 is broad and intense. The Catholic Conference of Illinois, Catholic Bishops of Illinois, The Patients’ Rights Action Fund, Access Living, Not Dead Yet, and RAMP Center for Independent Living oppose this law. Of the 3,265 witness slips filed that took a position, 2,668 oppose the law, while only 597 support it. And yet, Illinois Democrats with their supermajority in both state houses plowed ahead with it.
Less than a month ago, Pritzker met with Pope Leo XIV, following which Pritzker said with tongue firmly planted in his Ozempic cheek,
Pope Leo XIV’s message of hope, compassion, unity, and peace resonates with Illinoisans of all faiths and traditions.
Nothing says unity with Catholics quite like passing another wildly controversial bill that the Catholic Church opposes. Nothing says compassion quite like killing suffering people. But for bloodthirsty Democrats who support tearing babies limb from limb in their mothers’ wombs from conception to birth for any or no reason, killing terminally ill patients is a controversy cakewalk.
This is not an abstract issue for me. In 2019, my husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and then in 2021, he was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive, incurable cancer. Six months later, one of our daughters was diagnosed with cancer.
My husband and daughter were in treatment at the same time, with her treatment being especially brutal. My husband lost his fight, but she fights on with lungs full of clots, a blood clot in her heart, lymphedema, and neuropathy. She’s had a pulmonary infarction and cellulitis. She’s had radiation so excruciating that pain meds can barely touch it. A month before my husband died at the end of December 2023, our daughter found out her cancer was spreading. She has pain every day.
And her life has dignity. Her dignity is not diminished by her suffering, and it would not be enhanced by a doctor killing her. Her family, friends, and doctors honor her in myriad ways. Killing her would never be one of them.
In Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote,
[T]here are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. … A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.
SB 1950 is an unjust law.