Physician-assisted suicide is making headlines again.

As a matter of fact, an assisted-suicide bill in our great state of Minnesota was introduced this week designed to allow patients to request lethal drugs if they have a terminal illness with death predicted to occur within six months.

This bill came a day after World Suicide Prevention day happened.

This bill, if enacted into law, would attract people from all over the country to travel to Minnesota to receive lethal suicide drugs.

I am vehemently opposed to this.

Suicide to me is heartbreaking, especially for those who are completely healthy (from illness) and have an entire life ahead of them. Suicide usually occurs when the person feels something is gravely wrong in their life and there is no hope.

I don’t have a personal experience with someone close who has committed suicide but I did experience a few classmates who had taken that route in their youth. And of course, Becker and the surrounding communities has had to deal with numerous suicides over the years of youths whose hopes and dreams had run out.

My brother Christopher, who died in June of liver disease, once asked his care people when he was being treated, “is there a doctor here who could make all this pain go away.”

Chris had often spoke to us family members about his support for the physician-assisted dying option for those who are terminally ill. And as I watched my brother’s health dwindle away and his pain increase and the doctors telling us there is no way of healing him — I began to ponder Chris’s wishes to be euthanized. Instead, we just waited and watched until his heart, his brain and his soul, said, “no more.”

Was that humane? 

I wondered — even though the doctors told us he was “comfortable” — how can they just sit there and do nothing for a human being that is clinging to life? And if not help heal him, why are they just letting him slowly slip away?

Again, suicide I am vehemently opposed to. Assisted suicide in a terminal situation? That’s a hard one. 

Is it justified?

My wife tells me God is the only one who can take a life and I tend to agree but what about capital punishment? What about the casualties of war? Are they justified?

Where do you stand?