October 29, 2014

Pat Robertson and others at his Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) on Wednesday told a terminally ill woman that she was making a mistake if she chose to end her life on her terms.

Earlier this year, Brittany Maynard moved to Oregon to take advantage of the state's physician assisted suicide law after doctors told her that her brain cancer meant six more painful months to live.

"I can't even tell you the amount of relief it provides me to know that I don't have to die the way that its been described to me the way that my brain tumor would take me on its own," she explained in a recent interview.

But Wednesday's edition of The 700 Club featured two women who said that they had made the choice to live when faced with illnesses.

"I would tell her about how the love of Jesus had sustained me," breast cancer survivor Joni Eareckson-Tada said, adding that Maynard's choice would influence "thousands of others" to choose suicide.

Christian author Kara Tippetts argued that Maynard was hurting her loved ones.

"In choosing your own death, you are robbing those that love you with such tenderness, the opportunity of meeting you in your last moments and extending you love in your last breaths," she wrote in an open letter to Maynard.

Pat Robertson said that the "culture of death" created by "so-called liberals" was to blame for the Oregon law.

"They want to kill babies, they want to kill the terminally ill," he charged. "They don't seem to honor life. And what we should do is honor life, not hasten death."

"You want to pressure somebody? And you say to them, would you like to run up huge bills and burden your loved ones? Wouldn't it be easier just to leave this world?" the TV preacher continued. "The culture of death is so pervasive, and the pressure to end the life of these people, it is really tough."

In the end, Robertson argued that the best choice for Maynard and others was to "leave these things in God's hands."

"She has brain cancer, but brain cancer can get healed," he opined. "God can heal anything."

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