Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rustin, president of NCFamily. In each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. And now, here's the host of Family Policy Matters, Tracy DeVeaux.
Welcome to Family Policy Matters. West Virginia has scenic views, beautiful landscape, and flourishing wildlife. It also just made history by enshrining a ban on medically assisted suicide into their state's constitution. Most U.S. states have a ban against medically assisted suicide, euthanasia, and mercy killing, but West Virginia is the only one to place it into its fundamental.
Fundamental governing documents. Our guest this week is Mary Tillman. She was a major player in the movement to get this constitutional amendment passed. Mary Tillman, welcome to Family Policy Matters. Glad to be here.
What did you think about the effort to pursue a constitutional amendment on this issue in your state, and why did you decide to jump aboard? I thought it was a bold move on the part of our legislature that was wholehearted. Behind it, and I decided that if we can get all our voters educated as to the horrible risks that are involved in legalizing physician-assisted suicide, then that they would reject having that in our state. Initially, though, you weren't quite sure that a constitutional amendment was the best direction to go. Can you explain why you had a little bit of hesitation at first?
I did. When you're just passing a law, all you have to do is educate the legislators, and that's what. Hundred and thirty people, but if you're going to the voters for a vote, you have. We live in a state of 1.7 million people, not all of whom are voters, but we have to educate all those voters. And it's a little bit of a deep subject.
You can't explain it in just sixty seconds.
So you said that originally a delegate, which in our state is a legislator, a representative, but a delegate Patrick McKeon from your state legislature was very. And he was the one that pushed. Tell us why that was important to him and to you as well. Patrick McGeehan had been very, really traumatized by the fact that a person in his region was talking about taking his own life by traveling to Oregon, which does not have a residency requirement. That's the first state that legalized physician-assisted suicide.
And Patrick tried to talk this gentleman out of it. Tried to befriend him. Tried to surround him with a social network. But the man was, I guess, depressed and did travel to Oregon and take his own life. That was a horrible experience for Delegate McGeehan, and he didn't want it to happen to any of our West Virginia residents, like it happened to that fellow in his region.
Right.
So he kind of pushed and got this through your state legislature. Then he did. It went overwhelmingly in both our Senate and House, and then that's the process here in West Virginia. You have to get a two-thirds majority in the Senate. In the house, then it goes to the voters at the general election, and only has to pass by a simple majority.
Okay, so big win in the state legislature, but all of a sudden you've got several months—only a few months, I suppose—to educate the entire state on why this is an important issue.
So, is that about the time that you got wholeheartedly involved? Yes, it is. All right.
Well, tell us about that. How did that happen? What was your thinking at the time? My thinking was is that if you look at polls of people that have not thought about the issue and say, "Do you think it's a good idea to have physician assisted suicide for people with terminal illness?" the majority of people will say yes, but they don't realize that once that is legalized, it starts to go terribly wrong. And so, I was faced with the reality that voters need a lot of education before they can real.
Of legalizing, so it became a process of going on a very grassroots level: senior citizen centers, Lions clubs, letters to the editor, getting allies among the disabled people and among veterans who are higher risk of suicide to begin with. Educating them why we don't want to legalize. What we've discovered is in the states that legalize assisted suicide, the overall Non-assisted suicide rates go up. It's kind of like a suicide contagion effect. Also, some insurance companies say we won't pay for your curative treatments, but we will pay for your assisted suicide because it's so much cheaper.
So there's all kinds of horrible things that can go wrong once you legalize. But people need to be educated as to those dangers. Who was your team? Who was your huge team of people that went to all these small clubs and organizations to educate them? How many people did that involve?
It wasn't very many people, and that would be my advice to other states. If you're if you want to pursue this, is get your team together before you even go to your legislature. That would be my advice. But when we've looked at other states that, for example, have fought off the effort to legalize assisted suicide, and that's. A whole lot compassion and choices goes to each state and tries to legalize.
You have to have a team. You have to have the disability rights groups number one because they feel very threatened. Then you can get the people that are involved in suicide prevention, and you want them to know we don't want this because the overall suicide rates are going to go up. You want to get your church organizations behind you and getting the word out about how it makes. People feel like they're a burden, and that they better just kill themselves because they're a burden on their family.
So it's good to have all these alliances in place before you would attempt to deal with the issue. You've mentioned several of the things that go terribly wrong that maybe people didn't anticipate when they thought they were making this "quote unquote" compassionate choice. Give me four. What are four ways that this could go very wrong? The definition of terminal illness.
Number one, for example, in some states, I think Colorado's the leading one. They're starting to permit physician-assisted suicide for people with anorexia.
Now, the people in that mental health area say anorexia is not a terminal illness, but there's a doctor that's been certifying people as eligible, and anorexic patients are taking their lives in Colorado. Another thing that happens in the states that legalize is that they'll say, "Well, you have to have a six month or less prognosis that you're only going to live for six months or less." But if you have something like diabetes, And you stop taking your insulin, then you can almost force yourself into being eligible, or other medications that people could take, and they're going to live, you know, three to five years. But if they stop taking their medicines, they can almost force themselves into being eligible.
So there's that pressure that almost anybody can qualify after a while. There are even some doctors that are advising people to stop eating and drinking. It's called VSED. Stopping eating and drinking, so you're slowly starving yourself to death, and that makes you qualify as having a terminal illness.
So. The definition of terminal illness becomes squishy. The six months or less becomes squishy. The states that have legalized will usually have a waiting period, like you have to ask for it once, and then you have to wait fifteen days and ask for it a second time. Oftentimes, compassionate choices will go back to that state.
And legislatively eliminate the waiting periods because say that's a barrier to access.
So what looked like it was a tightly written law at the beginning becomes ever expanding. There are even, of course, the person is supposed to be 18 years old and competent to make medical decisions. We are starting to see cases where people the competency requirement looks squishy, either because they're depressed. Or they're maybe early stages of dementia, so we have questions about whether people really have competency to agree to it. You're listening to Family Policy Matters, a weekly radio show and podcast produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council.
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So this is sounding somewhat like a for-profit industry. Is this profitable for the doctors that participate? There are some doctors that sort of become the go-to guy in Canada. There's one that's really kind of infamous. She's done like 400 in Canada.
They have euthanasia. She's done over 400 euthanasia deaths.
So they sort of set up shop as this is where you go to get your approval for physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia. Usually, the laws do not have a way for a person, like a family member, for example. Family members don't need to be told; they don't need to know that their loved one is pursuing this. And so, a person can doctor shop. If Doctor A says, "I don't think you're terminally ill," I don't think you qualify.
They can just go to another doctor, another doctor, another doctor, until they get two doctors to agree.
So, there does turn out to be the doctors that will. Get on board more easily than other doctors.
Okay, so if they're not doing it because they make a huge profit, you think they just this is philosophically something they believe in? These doctors, I think so.
Okay, and you keep mentioning this Compassionate Choices organization, which I assume they also think they are doing the world a great favor by pushing assisted suicide. What an odd name for that organization! Is that on purpose? Do you think? Oh, absolutely!
It's a euphemism for sure. Compassion and choices. We hear the choices all the time in the abortion area, right? And it suggests that it's the compassionate thing to kill somebody rather than accompanying them in their suffering, being there with them as they end their days, but rather they want to. What do they say?
End the suffering, but don't kill the sufferer. They want to end the suffering by killing the sufferer instead of accompanying and loving, and you know, palliative care, hospice, other things that won't directly intend the death of the patient. We just have a couple more minutes, but let's just talk about the fact you're not like a paid lobbyist. I mean, you are a volunteer for a West Virginia pro life organization, and you just decided this was important, and you dove in.
So, do you feel like this is an encouragement, or should be, to people like you that are out there that just find something that that they feel like they need to take a hold of for them, just to kind of jump in? Absolutely, and anybody can jump in in a different way if they're afraid about politics or talking to legislators. The other thing I advise people when I give a talk about this is we can go and make sure that the lonely people, the elderly people, the sick people, the disabled people have a social network. Just like we, a woman who has a unplanned pregnancy, we have our pregnancy help centers, which help them choose life.
So we need to go around the people that are vulnerable to this physician-assisted suicide thing. Because again, there are two states that will take an out-of-state person and help them kill themselves.
So really, every state now in the United States, you could have residents going there.
So I always advise people look around, see if you've got elderly neighbors or relatives, and make sure they're being included and feeling loved. And having friendships, what a great piece of advice! You know, we can all do that for sure. If someone is listening and they're like, "I'd really like to have more information about the kinds of things that you said," what, what you know, what does your speech sound like when you would give those to these organizations? Is there somewhere they can go and kind of take a look at that?
There's a website that we set up back in 2024 when we were doing this. It's called CaringNotKilling dot com. No spaces. CaringNotKilling dot com. It still is up, and it talks about all the reasons why you don't want to legalize physician assisted suicide in your state.
And if anybody really wants to know more, they can contact West Virginians for Life. And just call up the state office and say, "I want more information. I'd even like to talk to Mary if if she's available." And the state office could get in touch with me, and I'd be glad to give more information about what we did specifically. All right.
Well, that sounds like a plan. Thank you, Mary Tillman, for your good work there in West Virginia, and for joining us this week on Family Policy Matters. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters.
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review. To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. And check us out on social media at ncfamilypolicy. Thanks, and may God bless you and your family.
