Lawmakers to work on proposal that would create a ‘duty to die’

Dick Lamm was the governor of the leftist state of Colorado for 12 years. He likely worked hard on building up his version of the Rocky Mountain state.

But he’s remember for one comment, during his campaign to push physician-assisted suicide.

That was that elderly people who are terminally ill have a “duty to die and get out of the way” instead of trying to prolong their lives through medical innovations.

Online resources reveal Lamm, who died in 2021, made his comment in 1984, and it generated a lot of controversy, even after he tried to explain he was “raising a general statement about the human condition, not beating up on the elderly.”

His comment was, “We’ve got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts and everything else like that and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.”

But Lamm’s influence was just talk. The Christian Institute in the United Kingdom is warning that government action there could make a “duty to die” more than rhetoric.

It is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who said legalizing assisted suicide “could open the door to yet more pain and suffering for those we are trying to help.”

He said, “Even where there is no abuse, the pressure to end one’s life early could be intense and inescapable if the law were changed” and that “the right to end your life could all too easily – and accidentally – turn into a duty to do so.”

The House of Commons next month is expected to consider a private member’s bill from Kim Leadbeater that would create a path for those considered terminally ill to be given help to kill themselves.

He continued, “I don’t want the people I love – or anyone, for that matter – to be made to feel a burden in their final months on earth. Dying in pain is not inevitable. Good palliative care can provide us with the dignity and compassion we are all searching for. My mum’s last days were eased by advice and medication from a hospice. She died peacefully, heavily sedated and deeply loved. That, to me, is dignity in dying.”

The UK’s most senior Roman Catholic, the Archbishop of Westminster, has urged churches to contact their MP on the issue, the report said.

“In a letter, Cardinal Vincent Nichols said assisted suicide pressures ‘those who are nearing death, from others or even from themselves, to end their life in order to take away a perceived burden of care from their family, for the avoidance of pain, or for the sake of an inheritance,'” the report noted.

He explained, “What is now proposed will not be the end of the story. It is a story better not begun.”

The institute’s reporting also documented how doctors have warned that such a plan could kill people who actually have years left to live.

Professor Katherine Sleeman, Laing Galazka Chair in Palliative Care, pointed out that the Department for Work and Pensions reviews its benefits for terminally patients every three years — even though they must be expected to die within twelve months to qualify for support.”

She said a six or twelve-month prognosis “:is an arbitrary line in the sand,” as it is “not possible to accurately determine someone’s prognosis as a number of months.”