Offering death under the guise of compassion inevitably subjects human life to a medical cost-benefit analysis. States which execute their own citizens will find it impossible to not devalue them. And in a culture that advances state-sponsored death, people granted the “right to die” soon sense it is their duty to die. Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims.
n 2016, Canada legalized euthanasia through the euphemistically titled Medical Aid in Dying (or MAiD). Since passing, the number of Canadians who either “enthusiastically” or “cautiously” support the practice has risen slightly from 75 percent to 80 percent. The response from communities representing those with disabilities, however, has remained consistently opposed. Their fears, that Canada’s end-of-life policies would prove to be only the cliff edge of a moral abyss, have proven to be largely accurate.
Canadian law, in all its majesty, has allowed both the rich as well as the poor to kill themselves if they are too poor to continue living with dignity. In fact, the ever-generous Canadian state will even pay for their deaths. What it will not do is spend money to allow them to live instead of killing themselves.
We should consider the consequences for societies that leap into medical suicide with nothing but good intentions.
A Netherlands medical committee recently changed its code of practice to allow doctors to slip sedatives into the food or drink of patients with dementia or Alzheimer's before they are euthanized.
In Belgium, the residents of nursing and rest homes were, according to a new report, “abandoned” by government authorities as the coronavirus epidemic raged. Out of fear of overwhelming Belgian hospitals, only about half of COVID patients in nursing homes that needed to be hospitalized, were. What happened in Belgium is outrageous.
Last week, the Dutch national health minister proposed that doctors should be permitted to euthanize “terminally ill” children under the age of thirteen.
Dutch physician Bert Keizer seems to be having second thoughts about the deadly system he helped create. He is especially alarmed at the developments in Great Britain, where Conservative member of parliament Andrew Mitchell predicted that euthanasia could be legal there by 2025.
Physician-assisted suicide is on the rise around the world. In his book The Thanatos Syndrome, Walker Percy described how a society devolves to the point of thinking that killing patients instead of healing them is compassionate.
