Vicky Hartzler: “Thank you very much, Representative Rothfus. I appreciate so much your leadership on this issue, as well as Dr.…”

“Thank you very much, Representative Rothfus. I appreciate so much your leadership on this issue, as well as Dr. Wenstrup, bringing this very, very necessary bill to the floor. Time is of the essence, and literally lives are at stake. Sometimes you hear that discussed here, well, this bill is going to impact life. This one truly does. This is a life-or-death matter with just a time limit. The way that this works is that the Constitution gives Congress authority over the District of Columbia. While they can have their own council and they can make laws, we have ultimate oversight as elected Representatives of this country over what happens here. When they pass a bill here allowing death to occur by physician-assisted suicide, we have the opportunity and we have the obligation to step in and to say no. As Representative Rothfus said, this is the people's town. This is representative of our entire country here, and this does not represent what we stand for, that if someone has an awful diagnosis that they are encouraged and enabled to be able to take their own life without any-- any--oversight in this. We have got to reject this. That is why we are here tonight. The statistics are staggering. Suicide is the tenth leading cause of death across the spectrum of ages, and the death toll is, sadly, on the rise. Nearly 43,000 individuals took their own life in 2014.…”