I remember seeing the movie Soylent Green in the early 70s. One of the shocks of the film has E.G. Robinson’s character leaving a note to Charlton Heston that he was “going home,” which turned out to be death via a euthanasia clinic. As I recall, the idea that society would become so crass and abandoning as to permit clinics where people would go to be killed was seen as beyond the pale.
Well, in the 1990s, Kevorkian urged the establishment of suicide/euthanasia clinics. Many laughed that off as advocacy from a fringe kook—even though he had better poll numbers than Barack Obama does today.
Now suicide clinic promotion has entered the mainstream of politics. None other than Patricia Hewitt, the former Health Minister in the Blair Government, wants to see them established in the UK. From the story:
Suicide clinics should be set up in the UK and “assisted suicide” legalised, Patricia Hewitt said yesterday.Forget the nonsense about terminal illness. As we have noted often, the Swiss suicide clinics that receive “suicide tourists” from the UK and elsewhere are not so constrained either in law or in practice.
The ex-Health Secretary will try to change the law next week so people who take terminally ill loved ones abroad to die cannot be jailed. But she eventually wants to go further and legalise assisted suicide. Ms Hewitt said she had been “quite troubled by the issue for several years”. She added: “My own view is that we should have a law for people who are terminally ill but also mentally competent of making that very grave decision.”
It has been reported that the Dignitas suicide clinic in Switzerland turns a pretty penny offing people. But at least we can take comfort that when chain suicide clinics are established, the efficiencies of scale should bring the price of dying down to a level everyone can afford. Hey! In the USA, the billions or trillions (whatever) being spent from money borrowed from China to pay for the stimulus bill could provide the financing! You too could start a whole new career in the fast growing industry of suicide facilitation.
Culture of death? What culture of death?
