Colorado has taken a horrifying turn in its embrace of so-called “medical aid in dying.” In 2024 alone, more than 500 people were given lethal drugs under the state’s assisted suicide law—solely because they suffered from eating disorders. What should have been a call for compassion and treatment instead became state-sanctioned abandonment.
One of those almost lost to this cruelty was a woman known publicly as Jane Allen, who battled anorexia for years. Rather than offer real medical care or psychiatric healing, her doctors classified her as “terminal” and prepared to help her die. It was only her father’s intervention—winning legal guardianship and destroying the deadly prescription—that spared her life.
This is the dark fruit of a culture that confuses mercy with murder. In Colorado, patients struggling with severe mental illness are offered counseling—unless that same illness involves food or body image. Then, they are handed poison and told it’s empowerment. The message is unmistakable: some lives simply aren’t worth fighting for. The state has crossed a moral line, treating psychological suffering as a reason to kill instead of heal.
Now, advocates for life are challenging this deadly system in court, arguing that it violates the most basic human rights and discriminates against the vulnerable. They are right. A government that claims to value equality cannot simultaneously authorize death for those who are mentally ill and malnourished. “Assisted suicide” in these cases isn’t compassion—it’s surrender.
Colorado’s numbers expose where the logic of the culture of death leads. Once a society accepts that some lives can be discarded, there is no clear boundary left. The same ideology that permits the killing of the unborn now justifies the killing of the sick and the suffering. The answer must be the same in both cases: life is sacred, always worth defending, and never the problem to be solved.
Discussion about this post