For years, Texas Right to Life has been fighting against the policy that allows hospitals to pull the plug on some patients.
"The hospital committees in Texas essentially get to decide whether a patient lives or dies, whether they can take away life-sustaining treatment against somebody's will and only give them 10 days' notice," Kim Schwartz relays. "This is very unethical, this is immoral, and it's unconstitutional."
But as of last week, hospital ethics committees can no longer use quality of life judgments against patients.
"When the hospital ethics committee meets and decides whether somebody lives or dies, it's almost always based on somebody's quality of life, or 'this person's life isn't good enough, we think, to keep living,'" Schwartz explains. "That's not the hospital's job. That is a decision for families."
Under the new law, however, families will have 25 days to transfer patients to other facilities. Another new law helps pregnant and parenting college students continue their education, even placing them at the head of the line when enrolling at public institutions of higher education.
New Jersey, however, is on the brink of becoming a tourism state for euthanasia.
The assisted suicide lobby has not been successful in convincing states to pass laws that allow people to kill themselves via doctor prescription. But Marie Tasy of New Jersey Right to Life says they have a new trick up their sleeves.
A nonprofit organization that "improves care, expands options, and empowers everyone to chart their end-of-life journey" has filed a federal lawsuit to force the state to drop its assisted suicide residency requirement.
"Clearly this is being done by the Compassion & Choices assisted suicide lobby so that neighboring states that have resisted passing assisted suicide laws will now have people come to New Jersey so they can open up these death clinics," Tasy tells AFN. "We're very, very, very concerned about it."
The only person who has standing to defend the state's residency requirement in court is Attorney General Matt Platkin, who has supported abortion and "so many misguided policies" in the past. So Tasy says her organization does not have "a whole lot of hope" that the attorney general will fight this.
If the lawsuit is successful, then the assisted suicide lobby will establish a clinic in New Jersey to assist the suicides of people in the neighboring states of New York, New Hampshire, Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.
