Your voice is urgently needed! A “study bill” (HB 410) has been introduced in the North Carolina State House that would allocate $150,000 for the North Carolina Institute of Medicine to study the legalization of assisted suicide. It is written in VERY pro-assisted suicide language and is obviously just a shot across the bow for legalization efforts.

Please take a few moments to send a message today to your State Representative asking them to oppose this bill. It is vital that they hear from you!

Contra the reassuring recitations in HB 410, the dangerous policy of assisted suicide puts our most vulnerable neighbors at significant risk. We must remind our legislators that suicide is not medical care, and we deserve better access to quality care, such as in-home hospice and palliative care, not an ill-conceived public policy that puts patients at risk of mistakes, coercion, and abuse. Despite proponent claims, the facts are clear that people access assisted suicide for reasons of disability, not for pain. 

Here are some of the reasons why they must oppose assisted suicide:

• Patients have been denied coverage for lifesaving treatment and offered assisted suicide instead.
• Young women with anorexia have been given lethal drugs by their doctor under this same policy in Colorado and Oregon. 
• Pain and suffering, or even concern about it, never make it into the top 5 reasons why patients die by assisted suicide in Oregon.  Rather, the most commonly cited reasons are disability related concerns, which is why the National Council on Disability rejects assisted suicide.
• Mental conditions are ignored and depressed patients receive the lethal medications. 
• Doctors make mistakes and patients who are not dying receive the prescription drugs. 

Assisted suicide laws abandon vulnerable patients and they impact everyone’s end of life care. North Carolina doesn’t need to spend $150,000 to study this issue as if assisted suicide were good (or even neutral) public policy.

Please fill out the form and urge your State Representative to reject HB 410 today.