Assisted suicide is not really about a “safety valve” against intractable suffering—that is just an assertion intended to soften the political ground, a cynical tactic intended to panic the public into supporting killing as an acceptable answer to human suffering. Scotland is the latest target of the international euthanasia movement, and true to form, the fear mongering is well under way. From the story:
A DETERMINED group of pensioners have taken their right-to-die fight to the Scottish Parliament. Militant Retired have lodged a petition at Holyrood calling for a referendum on assisted death. The group’s founder George Anderson said: “If I got to a stage where I was very ill, I would want the right to die to end my suffering. It’s all about having a dignified death, rather than seeing people forced to exile themselves in Europe for treatment.”By “treatment,” he means assisted suicide. Reminds me of the euphemistic term “healing treatment” used by German eugenicists for the infanticide/euthanasia holocaust that took place there between 1939-1945.
But I digress. Here’s the fear mongering:
And it was his experiences of caring for terminally ill patients that led to his decision to fight for choice over assisted death. “I cared for the terminally ill, both young and old, and was left feeling there must be a better way of facing our last days. People die dreadful deaths in hospital, hooked up to machines. At times, it’s about changing nappies and keeping their heart beating. And for what?”What a cruel thing to say. People do not have to be “hooked up.” It’s as if hospice doesn’t exist. And what a message that incontinence makes one’s life somehow less worth protecting. Awful. Just awful.
Do you think the reporter would at least bother to call hospice or someone with a different perspective that might present at least a counter balancing view and help people know that dying doesn’t make one undignified? Apparently that’s too much work. Or, perhaps it is really that there is only one side the media care to hear from any more, and it is the one—as in this story—that pushes the culture of death.
