Rubio, Duckworth Demand Answers from NIH on Decision to Remove Commitment to ‘Lengthen Life’ from Proposed Mission Statement

Senators Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Tammy Duckworth (D., Ill.) submitted a letter to the National Institutes of Health on Wednesday, questioning why the federal agency is considering removing the words “lengthen life” from its mission statement, National Review has exclusively learned.

The NIH is considering omitting the phrase in its newly proposed mission statement over concerns that its existing mission is “ableist,” or discriminatory against people with disabilities. The NIH’s current mission is 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.”

The U.S. medical-research center opened a public-comment period on August 25 to solicit feedback on the change, which has not been finalized yet. The comment period closed on November 24.

In the bipartisan letter sent to NIH director Monica Bertagnolli, Rubio and Duckworth wrote that changing the mission statement could negatively alter doctors’ perception of disabled people and consequently justify physician-assisted death for that demographic.

“Amid the rising openness of some countries, such as Canada and the Netherlands, as well as a handful of states toward physician-assisted suicide, 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,” the letter reads.

“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,” it adds.

A survey concluded that more than four-fifths of physicians in the U.S. “believe people with a significant disability have a worse quality of life than nondisabled people,” the senators wrote. They argued that this prevalent view in the medical community could further facilitate physician-assisted suicide for disabled people.

“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,” Rubio and Duckworth said.

In responding to the congressional inquiry, the NIH must provide a staff-level briefing to the pair of senators and answer several questions, including whether any outside groups were involved in the proposal to remove “lengthen life” from the agency’s mission statement.

The suggested change came after the disability subgroup in the NIH’s Advisory Committee to the Director recommended the federal agency more strongly “support disability inclusion,” according to the subgroup’s December 2022 report. “The current mission statement could be interpreted as perpetuating ableist beliefs that disabled people are flawed and need to be ‘fixed,’” the report reads.

Notably, this isn’t the first time the NIH has made a similar decision over ableist concerns. In 2013, the NIH slightly changed the mission by deleting “the burdens of” from the last item in the statement, which formerly read: “NIH’s mission is 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 the burdens of illness and disability.”

The revised mission statement, if approved, would be changed to “[seeking] 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 latest proposed mission statement comes as euthanasia has been touted by progressives as a humane alternative to medical care that prolongs life, especially when it comes to the health of the elderly and chronically ill.

Physician-assisted death, whether by euthanasia or assisted suicide, has become popular in the U.S. in recent years. Notably, the medical practice is legal in Washington, D.C., and ten states. New Mexico, Maine, New Jersey, Hawaii, Colorado, California, Vermont, Montana, Washington, and Oregon — all of which are blue states, with the exception of Montana — currently authorize assisted death.

Canada took it one step further by making the practice legal nationwide through its 2016 medical-assistance-in-dying law, which allows terminally-ill patients to voluntarily request to die. In 2022 alone, over 13,200 Canadian patients received lethal jabs, accounting for 4.1 percent of all deaths in Canada. Since the law’s introduction eight years ago, there have been nearly 45,000 medically assisted deaths in Canada.

The Netherlands, while it authorizes euthanasia and assisted suicide, does so only when the patient requests to die and the physician acts in accordance with the statutory due care criteria. In any other circumstance, the medical practice is deemed a criminal offense under Dutch law. Still, the European nation has seen over 8,700 reported cases of euthanasia deaths in 2022, representing 5.1 percent of all deaths that year.