Protecting West Virginians from medically assisted suicide: Vote for Amendment One this November

By DELEGATE PAT MCGEEHAN
There are states where it is acceptable for a family to discuss whether one of their members should kill themselves, and there are states where it is not.
There are states – Oregon, California, Vermont, Washington and many others now – where insurance companies can deny people end-of-life care–but offer to cover the cost of their suicide.
And there are states – like West Virginia – where they cannot.
I am proud to be a son of West Virginia, where suicide is known as a problem and not pushed as a solution. But well-funded liberal interest groups – like Portland, Oregon’s “Death With Dignity” – want to make us like them. They are lobbying legislators across the country to adopt their pro-suicide laws – laws that would make “killing yourself” an option facing every grandmother and grandfather in West Virginia at the end of their life.
This November, voters have a chance to fight back. We can protect West Virginia from medically-assisted suicide by voting for Amendment One.
The evidence from the Suicide States is in. Legalized suicide puts the disabled and the elderly at risk of being pressured to kill themselves. Legalized suicide makes a mockery of the effort to prevent suicide. Legalized suicide kills the research and funding necessary to discover cures and therapies for terminal illness: why “fight for a cure” when we can just hasten the death of those who need it?
But perhaps the most important reason to vote for Amendment One is to protect the character of West Virginia.
A place where a doctor’s visit can end with a discussion of poisoning yourself and arranging for the disposal of your body is not the same kind of place as one where suicide is off the table. What changes can we expect if we ever become a state like Oregon?
We can expect to become miserable and scared like them.
Americans are known world-over for our courageous optimism. In illness, suffering, and trial, we are a hopeful and grateful people. Our ability to affirm that “it’s a wonderful life” has built up a culture of firemen, emergency responders, and police forces who serve and protect this wonderful life from harm–no matter what. Medically-assisted suicide poisons this optimism. Instead of an unconditional affirmation that life is worth living, doctors, insurance companies, and lobbyists are allowed to suggest that there are conditions in which life is not. The people of Suicide States learn to ask themselves whether their life is worth continued care and expense–and to ask the same of others. Instead of committing to providing care no matter what, medical institutions begin to calculate the cost of care against the cost of suicide pills. The elderly experience the pressure to choose suicide when continued medical treatment would drain the money that would be otherwise left to family members.
“It’s a wonderful life” becomes “it’s only sometimes a wonderful life” and so, truthfully, “it’s a fearful life.”
Right now, in West Virginia, care is considered as a good and natural part of life. We were cared for at the beginning of our lives and were raised to care for our loved ones at the end of their own. When suicide is offered as a “solution,” this care is redefined as a burden. Those who we have a duty to care for are transformed to become those who could relieve us from that duty–by killing themselves. Within liberal Suicide States, the ill, the disabled, the weak, and the elderly only choose to be the continued object of our love and care.
This has been the experience of Oregon. Their laws pressure the most vulnerable to imagine their continued existence, not as a gift, but as a burden that their death would lift from us, along with a problem that their suicide would solve. A 2023 review analyzed what little data the State of Oregon has collected concerning its medically-assisted suicides. They found a steady “increase in patients feeling a burden and describing financial concerns as reasons for choosing an assisted death.”
They found a hastening of the decision to kill, “a reduction in the length of the physician-patient relationship from 18 weeks in 2010 to 5 weeks in 2022.” They found a profound unwillingness to treat the causes of suicidal ideation, with “the proportion referred for psychiatric assessment” at a meager and shocking 1%.
Let’s not be like them. Let’s fight back against the creepy campaign to put a price-tag on human life. Vote for Amendment One and protect West Virginia’s love for our elderly, our toughness in the face of suffering, and our willingness to sacrifice without counting the cost.
Pat McGeehan is a state delegate from Hancock County. A graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, he serves as the dean of a private school in the Northern Panhandle. Pat resides in Chester, West Virginia, with his daughter Kennedy.