assisted suicide

The Illinois Legislature has just passed an assisted suicide legalization bill, tying a black bow along with New York’s legalization bill passed a few months ago. Both measures still await signing by the states’ respective governors, which I fear is quite likely as the death agenda is firmly ensconced in blue state liberal/progressive policy on assisted suicide.

Should the bills get signed into law, more people will live in jurisdictions (including three of our most populous: California, New York, and Illinois) that validate some suicides and allow doctors to facilitate such deaths than live in states where assisted suicide remains illegal.

The states are nationalizing assisted suicide as well. New York’s bill has no residency requirement. Vermont and Oregon did away with theirs. And the Illinois bill’s residency requirement is so weak that one could become a resident in a day by, say, renting an apartment and registering to vote.

When assisted suicide is first proposed for legalization, we are assured by death activists that strict guidelines will protect against abuse. But they don’t mean it. Once the laws pass, the supposed protections — which are always flaccid to begin with — are soon redefined by activists and the media as “barriers,” et voila, the laws are soon loosened. It’s all a con, but people seem to fall for it every time.

This pattern can be seen vividly playing out in Victoria, Australia. The state was the first in that country to legalize assisted suicide, and now the government is making more people eligible for legally hastened death. From the premier’s announcement:

The new legislation will remove unnecessary barriers to accessing VAD, improve clarity for practitioners, strengthen safety measurements and make the system fairer and more compassionate.

See what I mean? “Strengthen safety,” (!!!) and “fairer and more compassionate,” really just means more people can become dead much sooner.

Two A-list Hollywood actors will star in a pro-assisted-suicide movie. From the Hollywood Reporter story: George Clooney and Annette Bening will star in In Love, an adaptation of Amy Bloom’s New York Times best-selling memoir In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss that is to be directed by Paul Weitz.… With In Love, Bloom wrote about how she slowly lost her husband to Alzheimer’s, how the two made the decision to travel to Switzerland to end his life, and the struggle to move forward as a widow. The book was an affirmation of love and the power of relationships. It was also named TIME Magazine‘s No. 1 best nonfiction book and included on their list of 100 must-read books. Read More ›

Euthanasia/assisted suicide “protective guidelines” don’t really protect against abuse. They mostly serve as window dressings to make people comfortable with killing the sick. And soon after legalization, the vaunted protections are redefined by activists and the media as “barriers” to death, which become the pretext for loosening the already slack guidelines. The speed at which that happens varies, but the pattern rarely fails. Here’s an example. In Canada, a person is supposed to explicitly request and consent to being killed by a lethal jab. But a dementia patient was recently euthanized at the request of her family. From the National Post story: A frail women [sic] in her late 80s with dementia received MAID after a family member brought forward Read More ›

I have always believed that liberals should be leading opponents of assisted suicide. After all, two of the core tenets of liberalism are (supposed to be) protecting vulnerable people from exploitation and promoting equality among all people. But other than disability-rights activists, most liberals tend to support legalization based on “choice.” Mega author J.K. Rowling, of Harry Potter fame, is definitely a political liberal. Indeed, her activism pushing against gender ideology is founded in protecting children and securing women’s private spaces. Now, with legalization having passed the U.K. House of Commons and the bill now being debated in the House of Lords, she has come out in opposition to state-sanctioned assisted suicide. From The Lion story: Author J.K. Rowling has Read More ›

I understand that people are terrified of dementia. Believe me, I get it. My mother died of Alzheimer’s. But I can’t wrap my head around the fact that advocacy for killing/suicide as the answer to the difficulties caused by the condition is becoming ubiquitous. Noted bioethicist and lawyer Thaddeus Mason Pope has written an essay, to be published in an edited volume, on this very issue. It lists eleven ways people can “avoid late-stage dementia,” and almost all involve intentionally ending life. Remember when we were told that advance medical directives are the key to not receiving life-extending treatment one does not want? They are, but that’s not good enough for Pope, because it doesn’t guarantee death: This strategy is Read More ›

ALS is a catastrophic terminal disease that, within a few years of diagnosis (the physicist Stephen Hawking was an exception), eventually causes total paralysis. It is also a tragic condition that euthanasia/assisted suicide activists zealously wield to justify killing as an acceptable answer to suffering.

Now, the understandable fear of ALS is being deployed by academic advocates as a means of breaking the (U.S.) requirement for a six-month terminal diagnosis and self-administration in assisted suicide.

In jurisdictions where MAiD [the euphemism for assisted suicide that seeks to turn life-ending it into a medical “treatment”]is legally available, such laws are intended to support patient autonomy and alleviate suffering. However, for patients with ALS, the clinical reality of progressive paralysis combined with legal requirements for self-administration of lethal medication creates a cruel dilemma. Approximately one-third of affected individuals express interest in MAiD if their suffering becomes intolerable [12], yet current laws require that it be initiated while patients retain the physical ability to self-administer the prescribed medication.

However, patients are not legally eligible to access MAiD until it is determined they have a life expectancy of six months or less. This creates a narrow and clinically unrealistic window where waiting until they meet legal eligibility may mean they are no longer physically capable of completing the required act, regardless of prognosis, suffering, or intent.

People sometimes tell me that nothing can be more extreme than the transgender craze. I disagree. The next step is already in sight, what is sometimes called “transableism.” Transableism is an advocacy term for a mental illness known as Body Identity Integrity Disorder (BIID). People with the condition anguish that they were born with body parts or capacities that they should not have. This may express as an obsession to become an amputee or paraplegic, as just two examples. Here is an extreme case from the U.K. as reported by the Daily Mail: A surgeon with a “sexual obsession” for cutting off parts of his body had his own legs amputated as part of an insurance scam, officials in the UK said Read More ›

An article in the Daily Mail sounds the alarm that permitting infant euthanasia — i.e., infanticide — is under serious consideration in Canada: Canada‘s assisted suicide laws have continued rapidly expanding in recent years, with a group of doctors now pushing for disabled newborn babies to be euthanized.…As assisted deaths have become a major part of Canada’s health care system, the Quebec College of Physicians suggested legalizing euthanasia for infants born severely ill. Canada has jumped so enthusiastically into the euthanasia abyss that I have little doubt that infanticide will eventually be allowed there. It’s only logical. If killing is an acceptable answer to suffering, why limit the killing to adults? Besides, as the story briefly notes, the Netherlands already Read More ›

Legalizing euthanasia/assisted suicide, abortion, and transgender interventions for dysphoric children is only the beginning of the ongoing destruction of Hippocratic moral values in medicine. Once such interventions are legal, activists next insist that they become readily available. But many (and I hope most) doctors want nothing to do with causing death or interfering with the normal functioning of healthy bodies. Indeed, many assisted suicide, abortion, and gender ideologues complain that too few doctors willingly participate in these procedures, as is sometimes protected by the law. These “medical conscience” rights inhibit the increasing hegemony of utilitarian medical values in health care. As a result, once life-taking or mutilating procedures become legal, efforts soon begin to conscript unwilling medical professionals into performing Read More ›