Euthanasia

California Governor Gavin Newsom is clearly running for president and — surprise, surprise — has a new memoir coming out. In an interview about the book, he recounted attending his mother’s hastened death. From the Washington Post story:

It was the spring of 2002 when Gavin Newsom’s mother, Tessa, dying of cancer, stunned him with a voicemail. If he wanted to see her again, she told him, it would need to be before the following Thursday, when she planned to end her life.

Newsom, then a 34-year-old San Francisco supervisor, did not try to dissuade her, he recounted in an interview with The Washington Post. The fast-rising politician was racked with guilt from being distant and busy as she dealt with the unbearable pain of the breast cancer spreading through her body.

Newsom’s account of his mother’s death at the age of 55 by assisted suicide, and his feelings of grief and remorse toward a woman with whom he had a loving but complex relationship, is one of the most revealing and emotional passages in the California governor’s book, “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery,” which will be published Feb. 24.

Some call it assisted suicide, but it appears to have actually been homicide because she was lethally injected by a doctor:

Euthanasia conjoined with organ harvesting just took a particularly disturbing turn in Spain, where a woman was euthanized and then had part of her face transplanted. From the Catalan News story: Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona has performed the world’s first face transplant with a donor who passed away from euthanasia. Around 100 medical professionals took part in the partial face transplant, a highly complex operation using neurovascular microsurgery techniques that lasted about 24 hours. In presenting the milestone procedure, the healthcare director, Maria José Abadías, highlighted the “extraordinary generosity of the donor,” the “collective effort” behind the operation and the “pride” of all workers who took part in it. Don’t get me wrong. There is no inherent moral Read More ›

The French Senate has said “Non” to legalizing assisted suicide. From the Le Monde story: The Sénat, the French Parliament’s upper house, on Wednesday, January 28, rejected a government-backed draft law on assisted dying that had been billed as one of the country’s most important societal changes in more than a decade. The law easily passed the lower Assemblée Nationale last year but was so watered down by right-wing and centrist lawmakers, in often angry and chaotic debate in the upper chamber, that supporters of the initiative said it no longer made sense. So, what did the “watering down” actually change that assisted suicide advocates rejected? The Le Monde story didn’t say. But the Christian Daily International story did: The Senate Read More ›

I really do try to write about other issues. But the awfulness keeps on coming. Yesterday, I called attention to the Canadian bioethicist who claimed that lethal jabs are no different than hip replacements. Today, I came across an awful story out of Australia in which Tony Lewis, age 71 and experiencing Motor Neurone Disease — what we call ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease — has asked for euthanasia because he was denied sufficient financial support for his disability. From the Hello Care report: A Queensland man with Motor Neurone Disease has chosen to access voluntary assisted dying after being denied support through the National Disability Insurance Scheme because of his age, reigniting concerns about Australia’s two-tier approach to disability Read More ›

Canada has leaped into euthanasia’s moral abyss with a smile on its face. Since 2015, killable categories have expanded dramatically, from those whose death is “reasonably foreseeable” — a category that was already so broad you could drive a hearse through it — to the chronically ill, people with disabilities, the frail elderly, and, starting next year, the mentally ill.

More than 16,000 Canadians were killed by doctors and nurse practitioners last year. It’s the fifth-most-common cause of death in the country.

Many commentators point to these and other facts about Canada’s euthanasia regime to argue against legalization. Defenders of euthanasia know this and have mounted counternarratives trying to convince us that so many killings of such a varied numbers of people is an excellent outcome of a humane policy. The latest example is in the Canadian Journal of Bioethics, in an article by bioethicist and philosophy professor Wayne Sumner, in which he argues that euthanasia should be considered a ho-hum question, nothing to worry about.

Sumner shrugs at the dramatic increase in the numbers killed since legalization because euthanasia is just another medical treatment and should not be considered to be extraordinary. Indeed, to Sumner, doctors’ killing patients is really no different than performing hip replacements. Ditto abortion. And since an increase in abortion rates (to him) is a good, and no one objects to more hip replacements, what’s the problem with the statistical increase in deaths by euthanasia? From “What’s So Special About Medically Assisted Dying?“:

If we regard an increasing number of joint replacements or abortions as success, with supply having risen to meet demand, why should we think that an increasing number of MAiD provisions is a failure, or somehow a problem? If more awareness, more providers, and more support are good things for these other services, why are they a bad thing for MAiD? Why should we think differently about MAiD than we do about other medical procedures? What’s so special about MAiD?

Let me count the ways.

Freedom of religion is on the ropes in increasingly authoritarian Canada — despite a specific charter guarantee of “freedom of religion and conscience.” Indeed, an Ontario court ruled previously that doctors can be coerced under threat of professional discipline to perform lethal jabs or abortions against their religious beliefs and conscience objections. Why? The court ruled that the unenumerated right of patients to receive any legal procedure paid for by the government superseded the specific charter protection. If doctors don’t want to kill, the court also ruled, they can either provide an “effective referral” — meaning soliciting a doctor known to be willing to kill — or get out of medicine. Now, in British Columbia, the family of a euthanized woman, who Read More ›

Once someone is considered killable or supported in suicide, they may become objectified so as to be used instrumentally. Such is the case with people requesting to be euthanized. The idea is that they are going to die anyway, want to die — even as they do not receive suicide prevention — so we might as well get good use out of them such as by conjoining their hastened deaths with organ harvesting. This abandonment (in my view) is rife in Canada, where in Ontario, a patient approved for a lethal jab will soon receive a call from the organ procurement society asking for their organs. The Netherlands and Belgium also permit conjoining organ harvesting — including of mentally ill Read More ›

With a scribbled signature by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, the Land of Lincoln became the 12th state (plus the District of Columbia) to legalize physician-assisted suicide.

The new law, which takes effect in September, euphemistically describes assisted suicide as “medical aid in dying”—a pretense that prescribed poisonous overdoses are somehow equivalent to administering healing treatments. Give me a break. The point of “care,” is well, care. The point of assisted suicide is immediate death.

So, why do I insist on using “assisted suicide” instead of “medical aid in dying?” Because this issue is too important and too much is at stake to fall for propagandistic word engineering.

The term assisted suicide is both accurate and descriptive. “Suicide” means to take one’s own life. “Assisted” means to have help in performing an action, in this case, intentionally becoming dead. In other words, it describes what was done, not why.

In contrast, “medical aid in dying”—or MAID as it is usually called—is euphemistic and intended to deflect from the reality of what advocates seek to normalize. Ditto calling poisonous overdoses prescribed for suicide, “medication,” which these laws always do. How can we have a meaningful debate when one side hides behind terms that are designed to lull people into a dangerous complacency?

On Monday, December 15, Wesley J. Smith appeared on Ave Maria in the Afternoon with Marcus B. Peter to discuss the recent legalization of assisted suicide in Illinois.