Euthanasia campaigners exploit COVID-19 fears.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Alistair Thompson wrote an excellent article - Euthanasia campaigners exploit Covid fears that was published by The Conservative Woman. Thompson is challenging the push by the euthanasia lobby to exploit the COVID-19 crisis to expand or legalize medicalized killing.

Thompson begins by commenting on his home country, the UK:

LAST month in the Times Lord Finkelstein, a well-known advocate for assisted suicide and euthanasia, fired the starting pistol in the latest round of the campaign to allow doctors to help to kill their patients.

In other newspapers, the timing of the campaign was justified due to the presence of Covid-19 in the UK and the anxiety and fear this has caused.

Thompson then comments on the experience with legalized euthanasia or assisted suicide.

In Oregon and Washington, the models put forward by campaigners, a majority of those opting to end their lives cite fear of being a burden, and others talk about financial concerns, while the list of conditions that qualify for the lethal cocktail of barbiturates continues to grow. At the same time, experts have warned that allowing assisted suicide might be normalising suicide in the general population. Suicide rates are a third higher in Oregon than the US national average. Put another way, more than six times as many people die by suicide in Oregon annually than by homicide.

It’s not rosy in the Netherlands or Belgium either. Laws supposedly limited to mentally competent terminally ill adults, have been extended to include non-mentally competent adults and children, profoundly disabled people, even those with psychiatric problems such as depression and anorexia.

Thompson then comments on the Netherlands euthanasia case of an incompetent woman.

Earlier this year we saw the acquittal of Dutch medic Marinou Arends, who euthanised a 74-year-old dementia patient who said ‘No’ on three separate occasions when asked if she wanted to die. In a recent interview, far from showing contrition, the doctor urged other clinicians to ‘just do it’, and shockingly the Supreme Court of the Netherlands has ruled that such deaths are permissible under Dutch law.

Thompson then looks at the Canadian experience with euthanasia.

In Canada, a court struck down the requirement that a person be terminally ill to qualify for euthanasia. This followed the case of Alan Nichols, a former school caretaker who was physically healthy but struggled with depression. His life was ended by lethal injection in July 2019. In another case, Roger Foley was repeatedly offered the drugs to kill himself while being denied the social care to live a dignified life due to the cost.

Thompson then comments on pressures to legalize assisted suicide as a way to increase the availability of healthy organs for donation and to save money in the health care system. He continues by pointing out that legalizing euthanasia or assisted suicide has been considered and rejected at least 30 times in the UK since 2003.

Thompson concludes by emphasizing the need to care for people not kill them. He states:

This is why as a society we must collectively reject attempts to try and subvert and exploit this awful pandemic that has already claimed more than 44,000 lives, a disproportionate number of whom were elderly or from the BAME community, and reject any attempt to change the law. The concern over deaths from Covid-19 in care homes has shown that the British public still think that we should provide proper health care for those who are elderly or disabled, rather than allowing the medical profession to succumb to the temptation of the ‘quick’ and ‘cheaper’ option of assisting the deaths of patients. What sort of society would that lead to? We only need to look across the North Sea to the Netherlands and Belgium to see, and the picture there is not appealing.

Thompson is pointing out the same things that I have been writing about, that the death lobby has used the COVID-19 pandemic to promote euthanasia and assisted suicide.

More articles on this topic:

• Stealth euthanasia: How many Canadian seniors with COVID-19 were killed? (Link).
• 81% of Canada's COVID-19 deaths were long-term care residents  (Link).
• Euthanasia doctor developed Ontario COVID-19 triage guidelines  (Link).
• Pandemic palliative care protocol. Selecting people to die and abusing the purpose of palliative care (Link).
• Decision making protocols during the COVID-19 pandemic (Link).
• COVID-19 triage guidelines and nursing home deaths (Link).
• Military reports disturbing conditions in Ontario nursing homes (Link).