8.02.2016

Families and Assisted Suicide Laws

A recent proliferation of assisted suicide laws has worked to place a new burden on families.  Family members need all the more to protect each other in the sacred gift of life, as a preference for ending suffering by ending life is spreading. It is currently legal in Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, in addition to California, Montana, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington here in the United States. In fact this means that 16% of Americans now live in a suicide state.

Research on this area for women who have died with assisted suicide reveals a gender acquiescence to death, sometimes fostered by a lack of family care and community assistance to those who chose assisted death. Read more about that at Women and Assisted Suicide: Exposing the Gender Vulnerability to Acquiescent Death.

Furthermore, parents have a constant and expected duty to protect the best interests of their children, which is clearly laid out at Tracing the Foundations of the Best Interest of the Child Standard in American Jurisprudence, and requires every parent to protect his or her child’s life at all costs.  No court in the United States would allow a parent to end his or her child’s life… but that may be in jeopardy in light of these new laws.

Family restoration and family strength are not advanced by the legalization of assisted suicide.  Rather, these new laws to end life place an even greater burden on family members to protect each in the face of medical protocols that may demand their death, instead of their protection of the sacred gift of life.

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