Project 2025: Where Christian Nationalists Decide When You Die
By forcing all Americans into palliative care and outlawing all death-with-dignity (Scroll to the end to listen)
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When people talk about bodily autonomy, it’s usually in the realm of the right to terminate a pregnancy or the right to treatments that allow people to transition to the body that matches who they are. Numerous writers have educated Americans on Project 2025’s plans for abortion, LGBTQIA+ people, and the transgender community.
But Project 2025 Republicans are coming after an aspect of bodily autonomy that none of us will escape: The right to decide how and when we die.
Here’s Roger Severino, an Opus-Dei-adjacent Dominionist Catholic, writing in Project 2025’s Health and Human Services section:
Project 2025, page 450
From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities. The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.
Few have talked about this aspect of Project 2025, because death-with-dignity is a fraught discussion. Until one is tasked with watching a loved one suffer for months or years, it is hard to imagine choosing to end one’s life. But death-with-dignity laws came about because of the toll this end-of-life horror wreaks: 1. On the dying person who must endure for some period with no quality of life; 2. On loved ones who must watch this suffering and are often tasked with caring for the dying; and 3. On finances.
Every American won’t be pregnant. Every American won’t be LGBTQIA+. Every American won’t be transgender. But every American WILL die.
Here’s how the Christian Nationalist stance against death-with-dignity could harm you or someone you love.
According to Death With Dignity, 10 states and the District of Columbia currently allow residents to end their lives due to diagnoses of terminal illnesses and dementia. Several states (Michigan, Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina) are considering death-with-dignity bills this session. New Jersey’s death-with-dignity law is currently being attacked by Republicans.
(Death With Dignity has an awesome interactive map HERE.)
Christian Nationalists oppose death-with-dignity because they believe God chooses when we die.
They teach that our bodies don’t belong to us; they belong to God. To them, there is no such thing as bodily autonomy.
By their thought-terminating logic, God chooses to make a person pregnant. God allows pregnant people to miscarry or have disabled children as punishment to draw them closer to him. God made humans male or female at birth and does not make mistakes.
And sometimes, they argue, God gives people things like terminal cancer to try to draw that person or someone in their orbit closer to him. It is a God-given trial that person and their loved ones must bear to achieve a necessary epiphany.
Allowing someone the right to die with dignity means they or their loved ones will miss vital lessons from God. Christian Nationalists want everyone who deserves God’s wrath to suck it up and endure it.
Don’t believe Project 2025 Republicans feel this way? Here’s their policy position:
Project 2025, page 482
Support palliative care. Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is legal in 10 states and the District of Columbia. Legalizing PAS is a grave mistake that endangers the weak and vulnerable, corrupts the practice of medicine and the doctor–patient relationship, compromises the family and intergenerational commitments, and betrays human dignity and equality before the law. Instead of embracing PAS, policymakers should focus on the benefits of palliative care, which works to improve a patient’s quality of life by alleviating pain and other distressing symptoms of a serious illness. HHS ACL should survey their programs to ensure that they are supporting vulnerable persons of age or disability and are not facilitating or encouraging participation in PAS.
Did you miss the Christian Nationalist language in the text above? The phrase compromises the family and intergenerational commitments is code for they or their loved ones might miss vital lessons from God.
Fascist Republicans don’t want anyone to have bodily autonomy. The more Americans who suffer, the more open and receptive they are to God’s voice; the more likely they are to turn to the One True God and repent.
Tomorrow, we will see the above concept play out in the wild. Thanks to a reader, I have an example of this dogma being preached from a Christian Nationalist pulpit. I hope you’ll join me.
This is sick on so many levels. Party of smaller government, my ass.
They insist that they have the right to control people from pre-cradle to death's door. Do they codify burial arrangements too? These people deserve to be cowed into silence. But "cowed" is not in their lexicon. What sublime arrogance!