Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) are sounding the alarm on plans by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to revise its mission statement to remove its commitment to “lengthen life.”
“We are concerned that eliminating the stated goal of lengthening life within the NIH’s mission statement without explanation or justification could have a negative impact on people’s existing attitudes towards the quality of life of people with disabilities,” they wrote.
The lawmakers pointed to what they said was the “rising openness of some countries,” such as Canada and the Netherlands, and a handful of states toward “physician-assisted suicide.”
“People with disabilities deserve to be treated with the same dignity and respect as non-disabled people, but stereotypes and bias in the research and healthcare sectors continue to prevent people with disabilities from getting the care they need, when they need it,” they wrote.
The agency’s current mission statement reads: “To seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.”
Under the proposal, the agency would change its statement to read: “To seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and to apply that knowledge to optimize health and prevent or reduce illness for all people.”
The proposal was recommended by the NIH’s Advisory Committee to the Director, which was established in 2021, as part of efforts to ensure the agency more strongly “supports disability inclusion” and “remove the language of reducing disability from the NIH mission statement.”
“The current mission statement could be interpreted as perpetuating ableist beliefs that disabled people are flawed and need to be fixed,” the committee wrote in a December 2022 report.
The NIH had requested that all responses to the proposal be submitted by Nov. 24, 2023.
Concerns Over Discrimination
However, lawmakers, in their letter to NIH, pointed to a 2022 survey that found that more than 80 percent of U.S. physicians reported that people with “significant disability” have a worse quality of life than individuals without disabilities.“Evidence suggests this could lead to discrimination in how doctors recommend physician-assisted suicide. With such pervasive, harmful views impacting so many Americans, it is imperative that the mission of the nation’s biggest funder of biomedical research be crystal clear,” they wrote.
“While we applaud the NIH for recognizing the disparity in current healthcare research and delivery for people with disabilities, we remain concerned about the proposal to remove ‘lengthen life’ from the NIH’s overall mission statement.”
The senators signed off their letter requesting that the NIH explain what motivates its decision to consider removing “lengthen life” from its mission statement and what, if any, effect deleting the phrase will have on the work of the NIH in its research and grant-making priorities.
Physician-Assisted Suicide
Their letter comes as physician-assisted death has become a heavily debated subject in the United States in recent years, with multiple states, including New York, introducing legislation to make medically assisted death legal.Currently, physician-assisted suicide is legal in Washington and 10 states.
Despite opposition from religious organizations, efforts to legalize it are also underway in a string of states, including Missouri, Michigan, Tennessee, and Florida.
A representative of the NIH didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for further comment.
