Eight years after her deadly fight, talk radio host Glenn Beck is stepping in to help Jolene Van Alstyne.
Beck, who hosts a three-hour radio show every weekday, told CBN News that he learned about Van Allistin’s story live on air from co-host Stu Brugiere, who asked him if he had heard about her case. Beck’s offer to fund her treatment “just came from me.”
The Saskatchewan native has been battling a diagnosis of normocalcemic primary hyperparathyroidism, a rare but treatable parathyroid disease that causes extreme bone pain, nausea and vomiting. Now, many years later, Van Alstyne has fallen into a sinister trap.
In late November, she went to the state Capitol to plead for help to undergo surgery to remove her parathyroid glands, a treatment for her unique diagnosis. Instead, she reportedly received another offer: assisted dying.
There are currently no surgeons in Saskatchewan who can perform the surgery she needs. As a result, Dr. Van Alstyne says he needs to get a referral to a practitioner outside the province, but he can’t get a referral to such a surgeon without first seeing an endocrinologist in Saskatchewan, none of whom reportedly will accept new patients.
During that time, Van Alstyne said the pain became so excruciating that she applied for Canada’s MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying) program and was quickly approved. She is scheduled to see her provider on January 7th next year.
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“My friends stopped visiting me,” she said in November. “I’m isolated. I’ve been lying on the couch alone for eight years, curled up sick and waiting for the day to end. I go to bed at 6 o’clock at night because I can’t stand being awake anymore.”
Van Alstyne and her husband, Miles Sandeen, are rapidly losing hope after years of conflict and are close to giving up on the incredibly unfair choice of continuing to suffer without a cure or an end to their lives.
Kelsi Schellen, a military veteran and anti-euthanasia activist, said the options before Van Alstyne could not be called “choices.”
“(C)hoice is only realistic if the alternatives are viable,” she said of Van Alstyne’s case. “If the choice is slow suffering or assisted death, that’s not autonomy, but coercion in a friendly tone.”
Beck is appalled by the facts of Van Alstyne’s case.
“How do you let someone die?” he asked rhetorically. “How do Canadians view this? Why don’t they stand up and say, ‘That’s unacceptable. She doesn’t have to die.'”
At another point in the conversation, Beck said that the West has become a “Malthusian society that doesn’t place any value on human life. And we go along with it, because life no longer has meaning.”
He further quoted a passage from Deuteronomy 30:19 in the Old Testament, where as the Israelites stood on the border of the Promised Land, the Lord said through Moses, “Today I have given you a choice: life or death, blessing or curse. Now I call on heaven and earth to witness your choice. Oh, that you may choose life, that you and your descendants may live (NLT).”
“We are here because we have lost the words that the Lord said to the Jews when they first entered the Promised Land: ‘Choose life,'” the radio host said, calling it the “holiest” principle of Western culture. “If we continue on this path, the Germans will look like new faces.”
Medically assisted suicide is currently legal in 11 states and the District of Columbia. The states that have legalized it are California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, and Vermont, with Delaware joining the list in January.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker (Democratic) is currently considering a bill that would allow mentally competent adults with a terminal illness with a prognosis of six months or less to request prescriptions for end-of-life medications.
“That can’t happen, it can’t happen,” Beck said, referring specifically to the Illinois bill, later calling on Americans to unite against such legislation.
Watch the full conversation with Beck in the video above.
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