Life is so precious, and the right to life recognized as a “natural” or God-given right, so much so that it was codified in our Declaration of Independence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Note that the “right to life” is given preeminence: without life no other right is necessary. And “unalienable” further emphasizes the untouchable nature of that right: mankind was gifted life by its Creator — the Lord God Almighty — and no man or government can take that right away except in the case of a proven capital crime.

Indeed, within each man and woman is the longing to live as well and as long as possible on this earth, in spite of hardship or physical pain. Even terminal patients, given adequate pain-relieving drugs, don’t wish to hasten death, but to live every moment to the fullest.

Joni Eareckson Tada, paralyzed and a quadriplegic since a diving accident in 1967, speaks to the issue of disability versus death following the release of the awful movie, Me Before You:

In light of the fact that California’s new physician-assisted suicide law goes into effect tomorrow (Thursday, June 9), following closely on the heels of the newly-released film, Me Before You, I wanted to sound an alarm about this egregious legislation and the glamorization of it.

In the movie, the quadriplegic says to his loved one, “I don’t want you to miss all the things someone else can give you.” Instead, he took away everything she wanted from him – his love and the essence of who he was – when he decided to end his life. Not only does this movie glamorize assisted suicide; it conveys the distinct impression that marriage to someone with quadriplegia is too hard, too demanding and sorely lacks the joys of typical marriage.

Regardless of whether or not in the context of a marriage, the taking of one’s own life or enabling a loved one with a disability to do so is never the answer. All life is created in the image of God and worth our greatest efforts to preserve and protect, and He alone is the one who should order the length of our days.

Some will assert that pain is an adequate reason for euthanasia, and yet, pain specialists state that properly administered drugs can provide at least good relief in 97% of all cases.

The final reason people may consider suicide is depression. And yet, depression can be alleviated via properly prescribed medicines and/or sound counseling. Thus suicide is a permanent “solution” to a temporary situation or mindset.

Scripture admonishes us to choose life:

I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live. (Deuteronomy 30:19)

So, with all the advances in pain meds and availability of rock solid counseling, why is the teen suicide rate soaring?

In a USA Today article, “Teen suicide is soaring. Do spotty mental health and addiction treatment share blame?” authors Jayne O’Donnell and Anne Saker write:

The suicide rate for white children and teens between 10 and 17 was up 70% between 2006 and 2016, the latest data analysis available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although black children and teens kill themselves less often than white youth do, the rate of increase was higher — 77%.

A study of pediatric hospitals released last May found admissions of patients ages 5 to 17 for suicidal thoughts and actions more than doubled from 2008 to 2015. The group at highest risk for suicide are white males between 14 and 21.

Experts and teens cite myriad reasons, including spotty mental health screening, poor access to mental health services and resistance among young men and people of color to admit they have a problem and seek care.

In other words, the experts have no idea.

And yet, for decades the “experts” have been telling students in government schools that they are the by-product of mere chance.

Author Frank Peretti sums up the abysmally depressing instruction:

Kids, welcome to Biology 101. We’re going to learn lots of fun things in this class. We’re going to learn how…we’re going to cut up frogs and we’re going to pick flowers. We’re going to learn about pistils and stamens and all kinds of fun things.

But the first thing you need to know, boys and girls, above all else is that YOU are an ACCIDENT!

You have absolutely no reason for being here! There is no meaning, no purpose to your life!

You are nothing but a meaningless conglomeration of molecules that came together purely by chance billions and billions of years ago.

All the dust and the gas in the galaxy floated around for who knows how long and they bumped into each other and said, “I know! Let’s be organic! So they became organic. And they became little gooey, slimy things, you know, swimming around in the primordial soup.

And they finally grew little feet and they crawled up on the land and they grew fur and feathers and became higher forms of life. And they finally became a monkey and the monkey developed into an ape, and then the ape decided to shave. So he shaved and became what you are today.

From goo to you by way of the zoo!

Add to that thoroughly gloomy “naturalist” teaching the Pew chronicled “Nones on the Rise” and you have a recipe for mental and spiritual utter despondency.

Pew Research reported:

The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public – and a third of adults under 30 – are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling.

In the last five years alone, the unaffiliated have increased from just over 15% to just under 20% of all U.S. adults. Their ranks now include more than 13 million self-described atheists and agnostics (nearly 6% of the U.S. public), as well as nearly 33 million people who say they have no particular religious affiliation (14%).

. . .

The growth in the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans – sometimes called the rise of the “nones” – is largely driven by generational replacement, the gradual supplanting of older generations by newer ones.

You may have heard Mainstream Media touting that “religion is dying.” But that’s not the story at all. Rather, affiliation in mainline Protestant and Catholic denominations is dying.

So we have several generations of youth taught from the earliest grades that they are nothing more than the result of a cosmic accident in school and receiving zero countermanding instruction in the home or in church.

That is a recipe for depression.

Add to that the disdain for life itself demonstrated by Planned Parenthood and every pro-abort in America, the implication being you’re an accident of nature, and if you in any way inconvenience your parents (who are also, by the way, just accidents of nature), then they will happily kill you before you’re born in the most painful way imaginable. And they may even allow Planned Parenthood to sell your poor little, mangled body parts for research to save other lives.

That, by the way, is a total enigma: why bother to do research to save lives of people who are an accident of nature and somehow, by random chance, managed to escape the abortionist’s butchery and were actually born!

The real question should not be “Why the high teen suicide rate?” but rather, “Why aren’t more teens taking their lives given an education and society that tells them they are an accident, that life means nothing, and that there is no hope after this life on earth!”

King David wrote:

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. (Psalm 139:14)

Which brings us back full circle to our Declaration of Independence, written by the Founders who believed and were informed by the Bible. Those Founders knew what King David knew — that the Creator of the universe designed and breathed life into each person, that life is worth living because of the hope we have in God.

Again we look to the uplifting words of David:

Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God. (Psalm 42:11)

That is the hope we must share with the youth, and other generations of America. That is the remedy for the epidemic of suicide and depression.

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It has been twenty years since Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide law took effect after a public referendum. Since then, four other states have legalized physician-assisted suicide.

Polls seem to show strong public support for physician-assisted suicide. They ask questions like this one from a 2017 Gallup poll: “When a person has a disease that cannot be cured and is living in severe pain, do you think doctors should or should not be allowed by law to assist the patient to commit suicide if the patient requests it?”

Unfortunately, most people have only a vague idea about what such laws actually say and do. Here are six things you must know before you decide whether to support or oppose physician-assisted suicide.

1. Pain or any other suffering is not a requirement for a person seeking assisted suicide; “a disease that cannot be cured” can include manageable conditions like diabetes as well as terminal illnesses like cancer.

None of the US laws are restricted to patients experiencing pain, which can be addressed in ways that do not deliberately kill the patient. In 2016, for example, almost half of patients using assisted suicide in Oregon cited their reason for seeking death as “Burden on family, friends/caregivers” while just 35 percent cited “Inadequate pain control or concern about it.”

2. Medical professionals participating in physician-assisted suicide are immune from accountability and standards of due care.

“No person shall be subject to civil or criminal liability or professional disciplinary action for participating in good faith compliance with” Oregon’s law. Thus any licensed doctor (or other healthcare provider), with or without experience and regardless of his or her medical specialty, can write a lethal overdose prescription for a patient as long as he or she claims to be in “good faith compliance.” As a legal standard, this test is effectively meaningless, because it relies only on the physician’s word.

The physician is not required to be—and often is not—the patient’s primary care doctor. Many physicians do not want to be involved in this process, according to “Compassion & Choices,” an organization that promotes the legalization of physician-assisted suicide throughout the United States. When one doctor (or many) conclude that it would be irresponsible to give a lethal overdose to a patient, such organizations encourage patients to find a doctor with lower standards.

No other medical intervention has such immunity protection from lawsuits or criminal investigation. In addition, no other medical intervention is so devoid of standards for the clinical expertise or education required of the physician involved.

3. Physician-assisted suicide does not involve the stringent documentation and oversight required for other medical interventions.

In all jurisdictions where physician-assisted suicide is allowed, to prescribe a lethal overdose the doctor need only fill out the required state forms that include a consultation with a second physician who agrees. Neither doctor is required to have a professional relationship with the patient before the physician-assisted suicide request.

Documentation of physician-assisted suicides relies on doctors’ self-reporting. There is no requirement that the actual taking of the lethal overdose be witnessed by a medical professional or anyone else. This means that there is no safeguard against medical complications, coercion by family members, or other problems.

The Oregon law also specifies that, “Except as otherwise required by law, the information collected shall not be a public record and may not be made available for inspection by the public.” Only “an annual statistical report of information” is made public, after which the original forms are destroyed.

Unfortunately, the immunity protections and secrecy surrounding even the minimal self-reporting in state-level assisted-suicide laws eliminate the possibility of future potential lawsuits or prosecutions for abuse. They keep alive the myth that there are strong safeguards in the law that eliminate problems like coercion or elder abuse.

4. The cause of death must be falsified.

States with physician-assisted suicide laws require that the cause of death is reported as death from an underlying condition rather than the lethal overdose, supposedly to ensure the patient’s privacy. But this clearly violates the standards set for coroners and medical examiners by the Centers for Disease Control. Those standards require accuracy in determination of death because “The death certificate is the source for State and national mortality and is used to determine which medical conditions receive research and development funding, to set public health goals, and to measure health status at local, State, national, and international levels.”

Falsified death certificates also quietly function to smooth over any problems with life insurance policies that have suicide clauses denying death benefits if the insured commits suicide within two years of taking out a policy. And since doctors are only required to “recommend that the patient notify next of kin” about the plan for assisted suicide, the rest of the patient’s family may never know the real cause of death. This means that they are also deprived of the chance to reassure their loved ones of their support and willingness to help take care of them until their natural death.

5. Assisted suicide laws promote discrimination against suicidal people.

The usual standards for caring for a suicidal person include intensive management to prevent suicide attempts. These are changed in physician-assisted suicide: “If, in the opinion of the attending physician or the consulting physician, a patient may be suffering from a psychiatric or psychological disorder or depression causing impaired judgment, either physician shall refer the patient for counseling.” Only the evaluation of a patient’s competence, not the diagnosable mental disorders that afflict more than 90 percent of people who die by suicide, is required. It is shocking that only 3.8 percent of those seeking physician-assisted suicide in Oregon were referred for psychiatric evaluation in 2016. Patients with dementia and with clinical depression that had existed for years before they contracted a physical illness have died under the Oregon law.

6. Suicide is contagious.

A 2015 article in the Southern Medical Journal titled “How Does Legalization of Physician-Assisted Suicide Affect Rates of Suicide?” studied Oregon’s and Washington’s rates of non-assisted suicide after assisted suicide laws were passed. Despite claims that assisted suicide laws would reduce other suicides or only substitute for them, the authors reached the disturbing conclusion that “Rather, the introduction of PAS (physician assisted suicide) seemingly induces more self-inflicted deaths than it inhibits.”

This does not surprise me. In 2009 my thirty-year-old, physically healthy daughter Marie died by suicide. She killed herself using a technique she learned after visiting assisted suicide/suicide websites and reading Final Exit (1991) by Derek Humphry, founder of the Hemlock Society (an organization that merged with another group to form Compassion & Choices). The medical examiner called her suicide “textbook Final Exit.”

Adding to our family’s pain, at least two people close to Marie became suicidal not long after her suicide. Luckily, they were saved, but suicide contagion, better known as “copycat suicide,” is a well-documented phenomenon. Often media coverage or publicity around one death can encourage other vulnerable people to commit suicide.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide rates have been increasing since 2000 after decades of decline. Suicide is now the tenth leading cause of death in the United States, with more than 44,000 people dying by suicide every year. Suicide costs society over $56 billion a year in combined medical- and work-loss costs, not to mention the enormous toll suicide takes on family and friends. Oregon’s suicide rate is more than 40 percent higher than the national average.

Is the real healthcare crisis not enough physician-assisted suicide laws? Or is it the staggering and increasing number of people losing their battles with mental illness and committing suicide?

No matter what Compassion & Choices says, physician-assisted suicide is not a civil right or just one of an assortment of morally neutral end-of-life options. It’s time to stand up and fight to keep the medical profession from abandoning its most fundamental ethical principles.

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This article was originally posted at The Public Discourse