The Southern Baptist Convention has voted to reaffirm its opposition to assisted suicide as more states allow doctors to help people kill themselves.
Messengers, the voting delegates to the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, approved the resolution June 10 during the SBC’s annual meeting in Orlando, Florida.
The resolution says Southern Baptists oppose “euthanasia and assisted suicide in all its forms.” It also rejects terms such as “medical aid in dying” and “death with dignity,” which it says make assisted suicide sound more acceptable than it is.
The vote comes as assisted suicide continues to spread in the United States. Currently, 13 states and Washington, D.C., allow the practice. Other states, however, are pushing back against it.
In Arizona, lawmakers rejected a measure earlier this year that would have allowed some terminally ill people to request drugs to end their lives, as The Lion previously reported. Opponents warned the legislation could put vulnerable and isolated people at risk.
In France last month, the Senate blocked a key part of an assisted-suicide bill for the second time this year. Senators also backed a separate bill to expand palliative care, which helps sick people without ending their lives.
Canada has demonstrated how quickly assisted-suicide laws can expand. Assisted suicide became one of the country’s leading causes of death in 2024, less than a decade after it was legalized in 2016.
This year, a physically healthy Canadian actress asked a court to allow her to undergo assisted suicide because of mental illness. Canada still does not permit assisted suicide when mental illness is the sole condition. However, that restriction expires in 2027.
Southern Baptists warned against that kind of expansion.
The SBC resolution urged lawmakers to protect elderly people, disabled people, the poor and others who may feel like a burden. It also called on doctors and public officials to support hospice, palliative care and medical treatment instead of lethal drugs.
Ohio messenger Glenn LaRue offered an amendment that added a direct spiritual argument against assisted suicide, calling it a “vital, direct counterargument” to the claim that assisted suicide demonstrates compassion.
LaRue said it cannot show compassion “if we are accelerating and sealing someone’s eternal destiny in hell if they are lost.”
The SBC has opposed assisted suicide before. A previous resolution said doctors have long followed both the Christian tradition and the Hippocratic tradition by refusing to help patients kill themselves.
This year’s resolution continues that position. It says every human life has dignity from conception until natural death.
It also calls on churches and families to care for people who suffer. Southern Baptists said people need comfort, prayer and support, not state-sanctioned death.
