West Virginia Voters Passed a Constitutional Amendment Prohibiting Assisted Suicide
West Virginians narrowly approved a ballot question to constitutionally prohibit people from seeking medical help in ending their own lives—while preserving the state’s power to kill convicted criminals.
The race was not called until more than a week after Election Day, with 50.4 percent of the vote in favor of the constitutional amendment, which bans “the practice of medically assisted suicide, euthanasia, or mercy killing of a person.”
The ban applies to both the individual seeking to die and any physician or healthcare providers who assist the effort. It does not prohibit palliative care or the medications that might be distributed to ease pain and suffering—for example, doses of morphine delivered during hospice care. The ballot initiative does, explicitly, preserve the state’s power to use capital punishment.
In both cases, the amendment might be unnecessary. Assisted suicide is already illegal in West Virginia, and the death penalty was banned in the 1960s. Still, if you’re going to elevate one of those bans into the state constitution, why explicitly exempt the other?
The main outcome of the election is to bind future West Virginia lawmakers’ hands. With the newly approved constitutional amendment in place, state lawmakers will not be allowed to legalize physician-assisted suicide without first passing another constitutional amendment.
Physician-assisted suicide was already illegal in West Virginia, but the constitutional amendment put on the ballot there was a response to legalization efforts in other states. Oregon was the first state to legalize assisted sui
Article from Reason.com
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