(Getty Images)
The results of a vote on a constitutional amendment prohibiting doctors from prescribing drugs to help patients die were too close to call late Tuesday night.
Medically-assisted suicide is already illegal in West Virginia.
Amendment 1 would add to the bill a rights a line that says “No person, physician, or health care provider in the State of West Virginia shall participate in the practice of medically assisted suicide, euthanasia, or mercy killing of a person.”
As of around midnight on Election Day, with 85% of the votes counted, 50.4% of voters supported the amendment and 49.6% opposed it.
Del. Pat McGeenhan, R- Hancock, championed the amendment, argued that the state should be proactive in ensuring that it doesn’t become legal in West Virginia.
“It’s very important to place this protection in our state constitution, to be proactive, to ensure that medically assisted suicide is harder to legalize here going forward,” McGeehan said.
Medical aid in dying is legal in 10 U.S. states. Bills to that effect were introduced in 23 states this year.
West Virginia’s amendment would go on to say that nothing in the section prohibits giving a prescription of medication to alleviate pain or discomfort, prohibit the withholding or withdrawing of life-sustaining treatment, and nothing in the section prevents the state from providing capital punishment.
The ACLU of West Virginia spoke against the amendment, calling it “unnecessary” and “backwards.”
“The right to avoid excruciating, end-of-life pain is essential to bodily autonomy and basic freedom,” the ACLU wrote. “Multiple courts have upheld the constitutionality of laws allowing death with dignity.”
The West Virginia Catholic church and anti-abortion group West Virginians for Life also supported the amendment.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.