Colorado faces a lawsuit over its physician-assisted suicide law, with plaintiffs claiming discrimination against the disabled.

On June 30, disability rights groups including the United Spinal Association, Not Dead Yet, the Institute for Patients’ Rights, and Atlantis ADAPT, along with one woman who suffers from anorexia and depression, sued the State of Colorado, Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, and others in response to the state’s End-of-Life Options Act of 2016 (EOLOA). The act requires that an eligible patient be “a capable adult resident of Colorado who has a terminal illness” and that two providers “determine that the individual is capable of making an informed decision.” It has since been amended to include looser restrictions on qualifying physicians and a shorter, waivable 7-day waiting period.

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Altogether, EOLOA targets the vulnerable with visions of a worthless life. The plaintiffs can intuit as much, but their argument is more technical than that: “EOLOA’s rapid pathway to death is a separate, unequal, and less effective way of responding to suicidality,” the lawsuit argues. 

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, “disabilities” count as “physical impairments that substantially limit major life activities,” with a broad enumeration of activities. Because many of these disabilities fall under the qualification for terminal illness, the lawsuit argues that EOLOA necessarily deprives disabled people of ordinary suicide-prevention treatment purely based on disability and that it thus violates the ADA, the Rehabilitation Act, and the 14th Amendment.

As is written in the lawsuit, “People who are suicidal receive radically different treatment responses by their providers and protections from the State depending on whether the patient has what the provider deems to be a ‘terminal disease,’ i.e., based on disability.”

The disability-centered argument is one of the primary bases of opposition to a similar law up for passage in New York, the Medical Aid in Dying Act. Having reached Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk for review early last month, the MAID Act awaits a likely passage into law.

But like EOLOA and assisted suicide laws, generally, the patient who requests suicide medication is specifically designated non-suicidal. Such discriminating terms obscure any qualms over mental fitness, as well as weaken MAID’s claims that some patients will be referred “to a mental health professional for a determination of whether the patient has capacity.”

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Several other countries, such as Canada and the Netherlands, have seen just the trajectory that US-based assisted suicide laws suggest will occur for people with psychiatric disorders, old age, or unwanted congenital conditions. 

In all of these cases, the “impermissible stereotypes and discriminatory biases” which the Colorado lawsuit alleges are, for once, an accurate description. A pro-death culture increasingly and systematically devalues human life, with consistent preferences against the unborn and the ill. Its implications for people with disabilities are not isolated, pretended, or temporary.