{"id":610,"date":"2025-10-02T11:01:44","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T11:01:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sleepystork.com\/?p=610"},"modified":"2025-10-09T10:15:42","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T10:15:42","slug":"assisted-suicide-was-offered-to-my-friend-jane-allen-she-had-an-eating-disorder-opinion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/02\/assisted-suicide-was-offered-to-my-friend-jane-allen-she-had-an-eating-disorder-opinion\/","title":{"rendered":"Assisted suicide was offered to my friend Jane Allen. She had an eating disorder. (Opinion)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The big selling point of assisted suicide laws is that they are supposedly compassionate and a progressive step toward enlightened autonomy. But assisted suicide is anything but compassionate for vulnerable people, like the tragic story of my friend with anorexia, Jane Allen, which shows how assisted suicide laws threaten the lives of the young and curable.<\/p>\n

\"Jane
Jane Allen in a hospice room in Colorado Springs around Dec. 8, 2020. (Photo courtesy of Jane Allen's family)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There is a controversial diagnosis circulating called \u201cterminal anorexia,\u201d which is an arrow to the heart of young people with eating disorders who are already experiencing distorted ideas of their worthiness to live. Now, where assisted suicide is legal, they have the state and part of the medical profession telling them they were\u00a0better off dead.<\/p>\n

After struggling with anorexia for most of her life, in 2018, Jane was living in Colorado Springs and getting help for her mental health disabilities, including her eating disorder. She ended up in the care of an exclusive boutique eating disorder practice. She was in and out of hospitals and residential treatment. Jane\u2019s condition resisted treatment, and she ended up receiving a \u201cterminal anorexia\u201d diagnosis.<\/p>\n

Jane wrote that her eating disorder doctor, \u201cwould \u2018make an exception\u2019 for me and \u2018allow\u2019 me to die, if that was my choice. It didn\u2019t feel like my choice – I felt coerced and spent an incredibly agonizing months in an assisted living facility.\u201d Jane did not get the lethal prescription directly from her eating disorder doctor; instead, she was referred to another doctor who promptly checked the boxes required under Colorado\u2019s \u201csafeguards,\u201d and saw to it that Jane got the lethal drugs.<\/p>\n

Jane\u2019s life was saved at the last minute when her father received a guardianship order from a Colorado judge and was able to have the lethal drugs destroyed. After that, Jane said, \u201cI ate just enough to not die right away. And then I ate more. I weaned off the morphine and all the other hospice drugs that kept me in such a fog. I was getting better, and then I was told that I was too much of a liability and dropped from the [boutique] clinic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI moved from Colorado to Oregon. I have a job that I love, a new puppy, and a great group of friends. I\u2019m able to fuel my body to hike and do the things I love. I\u2019m repairing my relationship with my family, and I have a great therapist who is helping me process all of this. Things obviously aren\u2019t perfect, and I still have hard days. But I also have balance, and flexibility, and a life that is so much more than I was told would ever be possible for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Jane
Jane Allen at the Oregon Coast on Nov. 26, 2023. (Photo courtesy of Jane Allen's family)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A week before she planned to go public with her story, however, she died suddenly of complications to her health caused by over two decades of starving herself. To this day, I wonder whether the months of treatment lost during Jane\u2019s detour into \u201cterminal anorexia\u201d care worsened her condition, whether she could still be with us today, doing all the good. We\u2019ll never know\u2026<\/p>\n

What we do know is that these laws are not so rosy as the propaganda would have you believe. They are as messy as life itself and there has been and will be more collateral damage in people like Jane or Coloradan, Mary Gossman, who was told by a nationally renowned Denver eating disorder treatment facility, \u201cthere\u2019s nothing we can do for you,\u201d which qualified her for lethal drugs under the law. She\u2019s in a better place now and has joined as a plaintiff in a lawsuit to overturn the law. So, I ask: how many collateral deaths are acceptable to you? For whatever purported good they do, these laws just aren\u2019t safe.<\/p>\n

Matt Valli\u00e8re is the executive director of the Patient Rights Action Fund and the Institute for Patient Rights both of which advocate against physician assisted suicide policies.<\/em><\/p>\n

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The big selling point of assisted suicide laws is that they are supposedly compassionate and a progressive step toward enlightened autonomy. But assisted suicide is anything but compassionate for vulnerable people, like the tragic story of my friend with anorexia, Jane Allen, which shows how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":612,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columnists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":615,"href":"http:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions\/615"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}