Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition
I don't usually write about pro-euthanasia books but Katie Englehart recently published book titled: The Inevitable - Dispatches on the Right to Die (St. Martin’s Press, 2021), merits an exception
Englehart may be promoting her book by discussing provactive issues but it represents the mainstream of the euthanasia lobby and her writing should be seen as a wake-up call.
We have known for many years that the assisted suicide lobby limited expansion of assisted suicide in the where it is legal in the United States order to claim that their is no slippery slope. So it is not surprising that Englehart questions the "limits" set by assisted suicide laws in the United States.
She writes the following in her Good Death Society Blog:
Away from the public eye, new questions about the practice of physician-assisted death continue to emerge. Should doctors actively present the option of assisted death to their dying patients – because, of course, doctors are meant to present us with all of our options? Or should they wait until their patients ask about it, lest the simple act of providing information be interpreted as an endorsement or a sign that the doctor has lost hope?The real question she is asking is should physicians promote assisted suicide to people who they believe are better off dead. She then asks:
Can assisted death ever be something that hospitals advertise? If a doctor refuses to assist in death, should he/she have to refer an inquiring patient to a doctor who will? Is physician-assisted death better carried out by a small number of specialized physicians, or by family doctors? The specialists would quickly become skillful, but the family doctors are more accessible. Also, specialization might ghettoize assisted death – and make it seem like something separate from normal end-of-life medicine.Forcing doctors to refer, advertising death and creating killing specialists (which already exists) will normalize killing.
should aid-in-dying patients be allowed to donate organs? Of course, that would require that the patients die in a hospital, via injection, to preserve the health of the vital parts – so we would need to change the death-with-dignity rules.Her point is clear, if doctors can euthanize their patients then organ donation becomes an option. She then follows that up with euthanasia by organ donation:
While we’re at it, why not go one step further to really maximize the chances of successful transplant: Allow organs to be removed from patients who are under anesthesia but still living, in such a way that the surgery itself would kill them? No doubt, some charitable patients would want the option of “death by donation,” as researchers call it. The question is whether the state should allow it: whether death by donation would amount to an odious ethical breach or would just be an efficient way to make the best of a bad situation – for the good of us all.Englehart is not asking a question, but is offering a proposal. Englehart continues:
As they are, existing Oregon-style DWD laws are defective. They grant rights to some patients but not to others, in ways that can seem arbitrary and unwise. A breast cancer patient who can swallow lethal medication might have the right to end her life with a doctor’s help, but not a brain cancer patient whose tumor has robbed him of his ability to move and to swallow. A person with six months left to live might be declared eligible, but not a chronically ill person in 10 times more pain. Why should someone who is approved to die be made to wait for 15 days, suffering the whole way through? And what do we do about all the people who would rather be dead than have dementia?Americans who oppose assisted suicide correctly recognized that the Oregon law was only a stepping stone. Assisted suicide leads to euthanasia and homicide by organ donation which will be sold as "a loving and generous act."
As horrifying as Shelly’s suggestions are for expanding euthanasia/assisted suicide, I find it utterly amazing, although I shouldn’t find it surprising, how the simple act of positing that death is a human right can lead to such ghastly conclusions. What’s equally amazing to me is how, once a person posits that death is a human right, one’s moral compass becomes completely short circuited to the point that ideas like organ donation by euthanasia or doctors “informing” patient’s of death as a treatment option fail to trigger a normal response of moral revulsion in the people asserting such ideas. What seems to make it all possible for the thinky crowd who push euthanasia and assisted suicide is their determined refusal to acknowledge the imperfection and corruptibility of human beings - their greed, their errors, their misinterpretations, their prejudices, and their arrogance. When taken into consideration, it is these qualities that upend the death-is-the-solution paradigm of the euthanasia/assisted suicide lobby, because inevitably, under their brave new moral code, people with less power will fall under the influence of the death believers who have more power and end up being steered to their own wrongful deaths. We appear to be at the beginnings of a new Holocaust.
ReplyDeleteIt is a horribly slippery slope. I can see that "death by donation" is not far off, if things continue in Canada as they are. I am asking God to please intervene, that our country will not go that way. That His (God's) will be done.
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