Eight years into a fight for her life, talk radio host Glenn Beck is stepping in to help Jolene Van Alstine.
Beck, who hosts a three-hour radio show every weekday, told CBN News he learned about Van Alistine’s story live on the air from his co-host, Stu Burguiere, who asked if he’d heard about her case. Beck’s offer to fund her care, “just kind of came out of me.”
The Saskatchewan native has for nearly a decade battled a diagnosis with normocalcemic primary hyperparathyroidism, a rare — but treatable — parathyroid disease causing extreme bone pain, nausea, and vomiting. Now, all these years in, Van Alstine is trapped in a sinister catch-22.
In late November, she visited the provincial legislature, where she pleaded for assistance to undergo surgery to remove her parathyroid gland, the treatment for her particular diagnosis. Instead, she was reportedly met with another offer: assistance in dying.
There are currently no surgeons in Saskatchewan able to perform the procedure she needs. So, Van Alstine has said she would need to be referred to a practitioner outside of the province, though she can’t obtain a referral for such a surgeon without first meeting with an endocrinologist in Saskatchewan, none of whom are reportedly willing to accept new patients.
In the meantime, Van Alstine said, her pain has become so consuming and unbearable that she applied for Canada’s MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying) program, for which she was seemingly swiftly approved. She is scheduled to see a provider on Jan. 7 of next year.
“My friends have stopped visiting me,” she said in November. “I’m isolated. I’ve been alone, lying on the couch for eight years, sick and curled up in a ball, pushing for the day to end. I go to bed at six at night because I can’t stand to be awake anymore.”
Van Alstine and her husband, Miles Sundeen, are quickly losing hope after years of fighting and are near the point of giving up amidst an impossibly unfair choice: Continue to suffer indefinitely with no path to treatment or end your life.
Kelsi Sheren, a combat veteran and euthanasia prevention advocate, has pointed out the options placed before Van Alstine hardly constitute a “choice.”
“[C]hoice is only real when the alternatives are viable,” she said of Van Alstine’s case. “If your options are slow agony or assisted death, that’s not autonomy — it’s coercion with a friendly tone.”
Beck, for his part, is gobsmacked by the facts of Van Alstine’s case.
“How do you let a person die?” he asked rhetorically. “How do the Canadians — how are they viewing this? How are they not standing up themselves and saying, ‘That’s unacceptable. She doesn’t have to die?’”
Beck, at another point in the conversation, said the West has “become this Malthusian society that puts no value on human life, and we’re going along with it because there’s no meaning to life anymore.”
He went on to reference the Old Testament passage of Deuteronomy 30:19, when the Israelites were standing at the border of the Promised Land and the Lord said through Moses, “Today, I have given you the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses. Now I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Oh, that you would choose life, so that you and your descendants might live (NLT).”
“We’re here because we’ve lost what the Lord said to the Jewish people when they first entered the Promised Land: ‘Choose life,’” the radio host said, calling it the “most sacred” principle of Western culture. “If we keep going down this road, we are going to make the Germans look like rookies.”
As it stands right now, medically-assisted suicide is 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 Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) is currently considering legislation to permit mentally capable, terminally ill adults with a prognosis of six months or less to request a prescription for life-ending medication.
“It can’t happen, it can’t happen,” Beck said emphatically, specifically referring to the Illinois legislation, later urging Americans to band together to stand up against laws like these.
Watch our full conversation with Beck in the video above.
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