This video features Martin Sheen warning against passage of Washington State’s Initiative 1000 to legalize doctor-assisted suicide.

Over at the First Things blog, Amanda Shaw writes about “some chilling news” about Initiative 1000 that she learned about last week at the Human Life Review’s Great Defender of Life Dinner.

Anti-euthanasia advocates Wesley Smith and Rita Marker warned the gathering that Washington has been deliberately targeted by the assisted-death lobby as part of its “Oregon Plus One” strategy. The plan: to pick off one more state that will join Oregon in authorizing the prescription of death-dealing drugs to terminal patients, in the belief that the practice will quickly spread across the nation once two states are on board.

Shaw notes in her blog entry how casually and callously Washington’s so-called “Death with Dignity Act” would operate if approved by state voters:

• The Assisted Suicide Initiative does not require that family members be notified when a doctor is going to help a loved one commit suicide.
• The Assisted Suicide Initiative has no safeguards for the patient after the prescription is written.
• The Assisted Suicide Initiative does not insure that abuse or the number of deaths from assisted suicide would ever be known.
• The Assisted Suicide Initiative would give government health programs, managed care programs and HMOs the opportunity to approve prescriptions for suicide to cut costs.
• The Assisted Suicide Initiative could victimize minorities, people with disabilities and poor people.

The assisted-suicide legislation, Shaw warns, “is frightening and morbid” from beginning to end.

— Tom McFeely