Thu Jun 15, 2023 – 2:56 pm EDT
HONOLULU (LifeSiteNews) – Five years after legalizing physician-assisted suicide, Hawaii is dramatically shortening the waiting period for obtaining lethal drugs.
Under previous law, individuals seeking to end their lives had to make two oral requests to their physician for a lethal prescription 20 days apart. Bioethics news service BioEdge reports that the state’s Democrat Gov. Josh Green, who is a retired oncologist, signed a law reducing that period by 75%, to just five days. The new law also lets doctors waive that period entirely if a patient is terminally ill and expected to die sooner than five days.
“Two of the largest healthcare systems in Hawai‘i found that a significant number of eligible patients run out of time during the waiting period,” claimed “right to die” organization Compassion & Choices in support of shortening such waits.
In 2018, Hawaii became the sixth state to allow physician-assisted suicide, with a law that required death certificates to list patients’ cause of death as their underlying terminal illness rather than the life-ending drugs they took. Since then, the total number of states allowing assisted suicide has risen to eleven.
“To legislate
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