I’m not shy about my objection to assisted suicide, by which I mean – in case you were not clear – state-legalized and managed euthanasia. It is, as most of my content on the subject begins, a slippery slope that gets slicker quicker, and we’ve been observing that in real-time.
Canada and Vermont border my home state of New Hampshire, and both have recently amped up or accelerated their ideas about regime-approved Medical Assistance in Dying, lead by progressive majorities. And it’s no coincidence that they get it from their ideological ancestors – eugenicists who sought to engineer better societies.
It is why I am so persistent in my warnings about stopping its, pardon the pun, progression. This is a problem well articulated by Wesley J. Smith, a bioethicist to whom my headline owes its credit. Amanda Witt cites him in a recent piece in Salvo Mag titled “How Kindness Became Cruelty.” The topic is assisted suicide, euthanasia, and the evolution and – almost literally, explosion – of the public/political acceptance of government-sanctioned suicide.
Under the sub-head ‘A Culture of Death, Witt writes,
In the past few years “death on demand” laws have sprung up in Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Canada. A few weeks ago Britain’s Royal College of Surgeons declared themselves “neutral” on the issue of physician-assisted suicide.
In Canada, Smith points out, “8 percent of people who die in Quebec are now killed by doctors or nurses.” He goes on to say that, “as if that weren’t enough, Quebec loosened the ‘strict guidelines’ again to allow people to order themselves killed in advance if they become incompetent.”
Notice that last part. Medically assisted dying is available as a remedy for not only intractable pain, but as a remedy for what Smith calls “existential anxiety.”
Governments, especially ones that believe they should manage everything, tend to create the misery assisted suicide will inevitably relieve. They also overpromise and overspend, so finding reasons to lighten the load is increasingly a budget decision wrapped in a compassionate language whose roots are eugenic. This is increasingly true when the same government ranks depopulation as a priority to … save the planet.
You would be wise to reverse-think the logic as in, the crisis was imagined to justify eugenics later, because the shoe fits. But you need not even make that leap, true though it may be. As Smith also notes,
“.. Smith says, this is the primary reason why people seek assisted suicide now—not because of physical pain, but because of existential pain. People fear the future. “
A fear created and managed by the government via what is, more often than not, a complicit media. A government that “is characteristically glacial when processing disability benefit claims but Johnny-on-the-Spot when you want the government to kill you.”
Smith says there have “even been stories of case workers suggesting euthanasia to disabled people denied independent-living assistance, and to veterans with PTSD as an answer to their ‘suffering’ caused by a lack of social services.”
And then, of death there is no end.
“Once a society accepts the noxious notion that killing is an acceptable answer to human suffering,” Smith writes, “the definition of ‘suffering’ never stops expanding.”
Today in various countries people can be killed because they are mentally ill, disabled, anxious, afraid of the future, or lonely. They can be killed because bystanders—including medical professionals—are tired of caring for them, or deem them unfit to live, or want to save money, or want to harvest their organs.
Landing us squarely at the bottom of the slippery slope where the state justifies chemical execution to relieve its suffering. Sanctioned death becomes a resource, a problem solver, a means to political ends, no different than any other despotic regime who, for all their faults, never had the gall to say they were doing it to ease suffering.
