On September 18, United Church of Christ minister Kristi Denham announced that a new organization of clergy called the End-of-Life Consultation Service (ELCS) had been created that would be devoted to ministering to critically ill medical patients.¹ She said this organization would "help terminal patients access hospice, pain treatment, and other excellent end of life care."²

At first glance, the ELCS sounds like a charitable Christian group devoted to helping the sick and suffering, or another new ministry devoted to providing spiritual assurance to the gravely ill. Well, not exactly. You see, what makes this organization different from many others is that the ELCS’s main purpose is to assist medical patients in planning their own deaths and one of the options offered by the ELCS includes committing suicide.

The ELCS plans to have an 800 hotline which would provide potential callers with "volunteers [who would] visit patients and families in the home, and together they [could] identify a path to peaceful dying, well-suited to an individual’s illness and circumstances."³ After the consultation the clients would then be free to "obtain and self-administer the means" of killing themselves.⁴

Rev. Denham also noted that the creation of the ELCS was precipitated by the failure of the California Compassionate Choices Act (AB374)—an act similar to Oregon’s assisted suicide law—to pass through the California state legislature. This failure to legalize physician-assisted suicide was not attributed to many legislators’ reluctance to open the door to medically-endorsed killing, but instead was simply chalked up by Rev. Denham to the legislature’s "playing politics."

As disturbing as the creation of the ELCS is, with its effort to wrap physician–assisted suicide up in clerical attire, its methods are really nothing new. Indeed, one cannot fail to see the parallel between the creation of the ELCS and the effort forty years ago by activist clergymen and women to legalize abortion.

Much of this early Christian support for the legalization of abortion was driven by an organization called the Clergy Consultation Service (CCS) (name sound familiar?) which was started by the Rev. Howard Moody, an American Baptist minister from New York.⁵ In 1967 this organization, which consisted of a group of twenty-one Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis,⁶ began providing a referral service for women seeking illegal abortions. It seems that the ordained members of the CCS, much like the ELCS today, were deeply frustrated by the inability of state legislatures to change existing abortion laws, and so they took the law into their own hands. The CCS grew quickly, becoming active in twenty states before the Roe v. Wade decision.⁷ And if anyone thinks that the similarities between the ELCS and the CCS is just a coincidence, one only needs to refer back to Rev. Denham’s statement in which she expresses her pride in being associated with "Rev. Moody, who has shown how clergy and caring advocates can change the law to meet current social needs through personal action."⁸

Well, we know how the story ended forty years ago: in 1973 the US Supreme Court moved to legalize abortion for any reason in the first three months of pregnancy, and for "health" reasons (which was interpreted by the courts to include any type of psychological distress) in the last six months of gestation.

Dr. Jean Garton, in her classic pro-life book, Who Broke the Baby, noted that the legalization of abortion opened the door to a dangerous and destructive "new ethic."

"In the acceptance of abortion-on-demand, there occurs a subtle but profound shift in the attitude of society toward all people who are unwanted, imperfect, and dependent. The same forces involved in legalizing abortion, while claiming to alleviate the suffering of a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, are the same forces involved in the promotion of infanticide and euthanasia, claiming to want to eliminate the suffering of the handicapped, sick, and senile. When we choose to offer death as an alternative to suffering, the list of those who qualify under ‘the new ethic’ expands greatly. [italics mine]"⁹

On September 18^th, the prognostications of Dr. Garton became a new and deeply sinful reality. The only question remains as to how our nation’s churches will react to this new organization. Will they, as was done in the 1960s and 1970s, simply bury their heads in the sand, preferring to involve themselves instead in preparations for the upcoming advent tea? Or will they publicly denounce this new organization which elevates death as a virtue and attempts to legitimize suicide by baptizing it in the name of Jesus Christ. My prayer is that they will choose the latter.