Attending the Human Life Review’s Great Defender of Life Dinner last night, I heard some chilling news from pro-life advocates Wesley Smith and Rita Marker.

In the coming days, the people of Washington State will be voting on Initiative 1000, the Washington Death with Dignity Act. Essentially equivalent to Oregon’s assisted-suicide law, this proposal is the result of concentrated funding and advocacy for assisted suicide from Compassion & Choices, a revamped but no less deadly version of the Hemlock Society. Determined to spread euthanasia “rights” throughout the country, the group initially targeted multiple states with no success. Now, the plan has changed—“Oregon Plus One” is the motto, with the anticipation that once the euthanasia campaign can gain a double footing, it will lose its stigma and push easily across the rest of America.

Following are some of the key facts, from the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide:

• The Assisted Suicide Initiative does not require that family members be notified when a doctor is going to help a loved one commit suicide.

• The Assisted Suicide Initiative has no safeguards for the patient after the prescription is written.

• The Assisted Suicide Initiative does not insure that abuse or the number of deaths from assisted suicide would ever be known.

• Of the over $3 million donated to the Assisted Suicide Initiative campaign, $2 million has been given by assisted-suicide advocacy groups, and campaign spokesperson former Governor Booth Gardner and his family.

• The Assisted Suicide Initiative would give government health programs, managed care programs and HMOs the opportunity to approve prescriptions for suicide to cut costs.

• The Assisted Suicide Initiative could victimize minorities, people with disabilities and poor people.

The complete text of the Washington Death with Dignity Act is here. It is frightening and morbid, from the initial definitions (“Self-administer means a qualified patient’s act of ingesting medication to end his or her life in a humane and dignified manner”) to the proposed suicide consent form:

I ____ am an adult of sound mind. I am suffering from ____ which my attending physician has determined is a terminal disease and which has been medically confirmed by a consulting physician. . . . I request that my attending physician prescribe medication that I may self-administer to end my life in a humane and dignified manner and contact any pharmacist to fill the prescription.
. . .

I understand the full import of this request and I expect to die when I take the medication to be prescribed. I further understand that although most deaths occur within three hours, my death may take longer and my physician has counseled me about this possibility.

I make this request voluntarily and without reservation, and I accept full moral responsibility for my actions.

From today’s Boston Globe:

The issue of stem cell research, while not at the forefront of this year’s presidential campaign, has surfaced in political advertisements and again during Wednesday’s presidential debate–casting a potentially revolutionary field of scientific research into the political spotlight once again. . . .

Now, scientists say, the field needs national support to take embryonic stem cell research from its promising early stages to the next level–despite development of a different type of stem-like cell–known as iPS cells–that is not from human embryos, and thus not as controversial.

“The idea that a field of science would be subjected to a kind of election politics . . . doesn’t really further the normal trajectory of science,” said Kevin Casey, associate vice president in the Office of Government and Community Affairs at Harvard University.

In the current issue of First Things, Joseph Bottum and Ryan T. Anderson explain that “the history of the stem-cell debate is a study of what happens when politics and science reach out to each other.” Harvard’s Kevin Casey would benefit from reading “Stem Cells: A Political History.”

These clips, if you haven’t seen them, are really pretty funny. I’m not sure that Obama was as sincerely amused by the wisecracks as he was obliged to seem. But it’s possible that he was–graciousness is a luxury clear front-runners can well afford.