Assisted suicide in Maryland is stirring through this electoral season and will certainly be in the 2027 Maryland General Assembly. Regardless of how the issue is framed by proponents of physician-assisted suicide, the outcome is still death. They have given death a new wardrobe. They've dressed a lethal prescription in the language of compassion. But do not be deceived. Make no mistake: physician-assisted suicide is still suicide. The goal is still death. The poison is still poison. And the people who will be most exposed to it—the people who will feel its weight most brutally—are the same people who have always been asked to carry the heaviest burdens in this state: Black Marylanders and our brothers and sisters living with disabilities.

I have testified before this legislature. I have stood before committees and spoken the truth plainly. I have made the legal case. I have made the medical case. And today, I am making the moral case, because there is a reckoning that must be named.

A Firewall Is Falling

For years—for years—the Black legislative caucus of Maryland stood as a firewall. At approximately 30 percent of the legislature, the African American delegation was more than a constituency. It was a conscience. They knew what their communities knew. They had heard the sermons. They understood, instinctively and historically, that when the government starts making death affordable and convenient, it is the poor and the brown and the disabled who get offered the off-ramp first. They voted no, no to Medical aid in dying (MAID) because they understood the stakes.

The members of the legislature representing the most Black-populated jurisdictions in this state consistently voted against the bill in 2019 with a simple, almost pastoral, reasoning: they feared medical centers, including nursing homes, would coerce vulnerable people into a decision they hadn't truly made for themselves. That is a lived reality for communities where medical trust has been seared in the furnace of Tuskegee and forced sterilizations.

Now,........

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