New Mexico has been known as the nation’s late term abortion capital. It is no surprise, then, that their legislation allows for physician assisted suicide. Bill HB-171 (euphemistically called the “Elizabeth Whitefield End-of-Life Options Act”) allows doctors to prescribe life-ending medication to patients they deem mentally competent and within six months of death. Patients then self-administer the drug.
When this bill was presented in 2021, many people—including physicians and attorneys— gathered to offer their perspectives to our state’s Health Committee reviewing the bill. As a pastor representing Bible-believing evangelical Christians, these were the remarks I prepared:[1]
1. Time at the mic did not allow this full testimony. Thus, what is written below is an expanded version of my initial comments.
_____
I’m here as a pastor from Desert Springs Church in Albuquerque. I also coordinate network of thirty pastors in our region. Representing these pastors and their churches, I stand in opposition to the End-of-Life Options Act.
I owe you three words this morning.
I Owe You a Word of Thanks
Thank you to the NM House Health Committee for seeking to discern and serve the best interests of our state. To the physicians who are with us, thank you for caring for the sick. Tyler is my 39-year-old brother. After multiple open-heart surgeries, he contracted meningitis in the hospital at 18 months old. Today he is severely mentally handicapped. You are brilliant, you work hard for us, you deal frequently in difficult ambiguities, and we need you. Thank you. To those here who have suffered and are suffering, we grieve with you. Death is cruel. As a pastor, I’ve seen it up close. This topic is not abstract to me or for any of us.
To the committee, I owe you a second thing.
I Owe You a Word of Truth
No doubt for some, support for this bill springs from a noble motive and moral imperative: compassion. May we never tire of doing right from compassion. But it crosses a bright line that we shall not cross together, friends. Physicians should treat fellow human beings in the course of death. Physicians must never treat the suffering with death. This line is clear, ancient, tested, needed, and unambiguous.
A familiar verse in Scripture limits our choices in a compassionate way: “You shall not murder.” Suicide is self-murder. Assisted suicide—however motivated—is a form of murder. Job’s wife said to him, “curse God and die.” He did not. Rather, he “fear[ed] God and turn[ed] away from evil.” We are not self-created and so we shall not self-destruct. We are not the origin of the life we possess, and we must not dispose ourselves of that life.
God’s command against murder stands on two pillars.
- The first pillar: human worth. We are not animals. They can kill and eat one another. We can put them to sleep. But there is a reason we have hospitals and oaths and compassion. There is a reason why we are here today. We are human beings—creatures of inestimable worth. My brother’s dignity is not from any capacity he possesses or contribution he makes, but from his status as one made in God’s image.
- The second pillar: human sinfulness. Not only are we limited as finite beings, but we are limited as fallen and flawed beings. There is a reason we need this command against murder. Humans can break terribly bad.[2] The Bible calls it sin. Others call it human nature. We might call it the evening news and twentieth century history. We may not agree on what to call it, but we should all agree that human beings, marvelous though we are, are capable of the most heinous evil—the taking of life.
2. Time at the mic did not allow this full testimony. Thus, what is written below is an expanded version of my initial comments.
Given human nature, while this bill has a compassionate beginning, it fanciful to think this bill will serve only compassionate ends. As with any bill, we may consider the intentions of some who support the bill, but also the unintended consequences we can reasonably expect from this bill.
- This bill will serve commercial ends. For financially-driven third parties in a finance driven industry, shorter lives are cheaper lives. This bill will be good for business and bad for patients.
- This bill will serve ends of convenience. Our age does not value age. The aging are made to feel unneeded and unwanted. Who can’t hear the elderly mother saying to herself, “I’m such a burden to my busy son. I know I’m disgusting. He has a young family and bills to pay. Is it time for me to go?” This bill will be bad for the elderly.
- This bill will serve cruel ends. Inside this bill is a poison pill which connects compassion to intentional death. By advancing this bill we advance that logic. How will the next generation apply this bill’s legal logic of compassion? What about the deformed infant or the elderly with Alzheimer’s who can’t ask for the prescription? Shouldn’t someone decide for them? Many countries have already answered these questions. What begins as a compassionate option for patients will end as a “compassionate” duty for physicians.
- And, yes, because of human sin, this bill will serve coercive ends. I am concerned here for particular minority communities, rural communities, the poor, and the disabled—those who as a matter of capacity or culture are more vulnerable to persuasion and suggestion, who more readily defer to authority of all kinds.
My friends, this is a bad bill. Like a Trojan horse, its protections conceal its deadly logic.
Let us pursue compassion, tirelessly! But, please, do not lead us into a partnership with death. Do not turn your head to the logic present in this bill and where it leads. Do not ask us to allow our doctors to prescribe deadly poison.
Life is theirs to heal if they can. It is not theirs to take if they can’t.
I Owe You a Word of Welcome
If you are suffering, I welcome you to come into our churches; come to my church, and see how we love one another. See how we care for our sick, our elderly, our deformed, our orphans and widows, the poor, the weak. Let us love you. You are not a burden. Your life, every moment you have, is a blessing for us and a sacred trust.
If you care for the suffering, I welcome you to send them to our churches. We have an answer for hopelessness. A man walked through our door 18 months ago with terminal cancer. We helped him get right with people. More importantly we heled him get right with his Maker. He died a painful, terrible dead. I was there. It was also an honorable and dignified death.
We don’t help people die. We help people die well.
So, send us your suffering. We have something to offer them—we have Someone to offer them; a savior who suffered affliction and death; our great physician, who mends our souls even as our minds and bodies fail.
Finally, a Word about Tyler
With dropping blood pressure, Tyler was taken from his nursing home to the ICU. A state away, my mom arrived five hours later. She had been through this before. But this time, when she arrived, no ordinary care was underway. Why not? Because Tyler had “do-not-resuscitate” orders. Which they translated into do-not-treat orders. Here are the words my mom—Tyler’s mom—heard when she arrived: “you have some decisions to make, ma’am. Think about the quality of his life.” Yet, they hadn’t taken the first step toward a diagnosis.
After several days, Tyler was sent home on hospice to die a painful death. That was ten years ago, and he’s with us today. It was a mistake—a misdiagnosis. It was also a familiar experience. Tyler contracted meningitis as a baby because of a doctor’s mistake. We have never held it against the doctor. Medical professionals are marvelous human beings. And like all human beings they are finite, and they are fallen.
A vote for this bill is a vote for its logic. And the logic of this bill has my brother in its crosshairs. No, this bill will not permit a prescription for my brother Tyler. But its logic, in due time, will.
Death is an enemy. It is not an “option.” We reject The End-of-Life Options Act.
The State of the Issue Today
I delivered these remarks in 2017, and in that time much has changed. On a personal level, my brother Tyler passed away, and I have moved into a season of life in which I am caring for aging family members. This issue has become acute for me in new ways. On the national level, as of January 2024 there are eleven states/districts (including New Mexico) in which assisted suicide is legal (CA, CO, DC, HI, ME, MT, NJ, NM, OR, VT, & WA). While two of these states (MT & NJ) are considering overturning their assisted suicide laws, six more were considering legalization in the 2024 legislative session (DE, IL, IN, MO, NH, & NY).[3]
3. If you live in one of these states, consider contacting your local state assembly member to keep this legislation from passing.
In many of these cases, the political left has prepared groundwork for months or years, busing people in from out of state and rehearsing their remarks for maximal persuasiveness. Conservatives, however, have been caught flat-footed, disorganized, and unprepared. That was my experience on the day I delivered these remarks. There were dozens if not hundreds present in favor of the bill with a line of prepared and emotionally intense testimonies. Against the bill there were only a small number of us. The current situation is dire; as Christians we must stand up for life, educate one another, and work together to rebuff efforts to legalize murder in our nation and our states.
At the end of the day, all legislation is theological application. Everyone has a theology; the only questions are what that theology is and how it is applied. If Christian theology is kept separate from the political sphere, then demonic theology which seeks to overthrow God and destroy his image will rule in its place. This is not to say that church and state are the same, that the church should rule the state, or that God’s special requirements for his covenant people should be imposed on the entire nation. Nonetheless, because all legislation is theological application, we must make every effort to apply Christian theology, in an appropriate manner, to the legislative and political issues of our day.
May God grant us courage and fortitude to stand on his truth, rightly stewarding the authority He has given each of us in our Constitutional Democratic Republic, for His glory and for the flourishing of His image bearers.
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at the Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention, and is used here with permission of the ERLC and the author.
