When does the right to suicide become an obligation to die? Once again, Europe is pushing the boundaries.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you were a psychiatrist and a chronically depressed patient told you he wanted to die, what would you do?\u201d That\u2019s the question Charles Lane of the Washington Post recently asked.<\/p>\n
In the United States, at least for now, the answer would be to employ a combination of talk therapy and drugs to ease the patient\u2019s pain and alleviate what psychiatrists call \u201csuicidal ideation.\u201d If necessary, you might consider hospitalizing your patient.<\/p>\n
But in Belgium, as Lane tells readers, \u201cyou might prescribe this vulnerable, desperate person a fatal dose of sodium thiopental.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Lane tells readers, between 2007 and 2011, 100 people went to a clinic in Belgium seeking euthanasia. While most of them were clinically-depressed, not all of them were. Some of them were schizophrenic; others had Asperger\u2019s Syndrome, a form of autism.<\/p>\n
What happened in forty-eight of the cases was chilling: \u201cThe doctors, satisfied that [these] patients were in earnest, and that their conditions were \u2018untreatable\u2019 and \u2018unbearable,\u2019 offered them lethal injection; 35 went through with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The same thing is happening next door in the Netherlands. A clinic there euthanized 11 people in 2012 whose \u201conly complaint was being \u2018tired of living.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Lane rightly characterizes this trend as \u201csinister.\u201d Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, bioethicists Barron H. Lerner and Arthur L. Caplan said that the reports from the ironically-named \u201clow countries,\u201d \u201cseem to validate concerns about where these practices might lead.\u201d<\/p>\n
To which Lane replied, \u201cThat\u2019s putting it mildly.\u201d<\/p>\n
As he writes, \u201cWhat\u2019s noteworthy about euthanasia in Europe … has been its tendency to expand, once the taboo against physician-aided death was breached in favor of more malleable concepts such as \u2018patient autonomy.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
And as Belgian law professor \u00c9tienne Montero has warned, \u201cWhat is presented at first as a right is going to become a kind of obligation.\u201d<\/p>\n
I recently told you about the Third Reich\u2019s euthanasia program code-named Aktion T-4. Between 1939 and 1940, as many as 70,000 disabled and sick people, whom the Nazis deemed \u201clives unworthy of life,\u201d were exterminated \u2014 murdered \u2014 in psychiatric hospitals across the Reich.<\/p>\n
Now, in case you\u2019re wondering, I\u2019m not saying that what\u2019s happening in Europe today is the equivalent of Aktion T-4. In some important respects, however, it\u2019s arguably worse.<\/p>\n
Because while the Nazis killed schizophrenics and people with autism, I\u2019m not aware of their killing people who were merely depressed or \u201ctired of living.\u201d Modern Europeans seem hell-bent on expanding the definition of a life unworthy of life.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, unlike 1940, there\u2019s no real opposition. Hitler was forced to abandon Aktion T-4 because of the opposition of people like Lothar Kreyssig, a judge in Brandenburg and a member of the Confessing Church, and the Bishop of Munster, August Graf von Galen, who publically condemned the program in a series of sermons that were printed and disseminated.<\/p>\n
These courageous acts roused public opinion against the program and resulted in a rare victory for human decency in the Third Reich.<\/p>\n
Today, what Lane calls the \u201cslide\u201d toward euthanasia continues largely unabated \u2014 not only in Europe but in the U.S. as well. As Lerner and Caplan wrote, all this \u201cshould give us pause\u201d about where the so-called \u201cassisted dying\u201d movement will lead.<\/p>\n
And here\u2019s a hint: you don\u2019t need jackboots and brown shirts anymore to turn entire classes of people into lives unworthy of life.<\/p>\n
________<\/p>\n
RESOURCES<\/p>\n
Europe\u2019s sinister expansion of euthanasia
\nCharles Lane, Washington Post, August 19, 2015<\/p>\n
Doctor-Assisted Suicide Is Unethical and Dangerous
\nIra Byock, New York Times, October 6, 2014<\/p>\n
\u201cEuthanasia in Belgium: Safeguards and controls do not work\u201d according to Professor Dr. Etienne Montero, Dean of the Faculty of Law, University of Namur, Belgium
\nPress release, Marketwatch.com, December 8, 2013<\/p>\n
Eugenics and Not-So Ancient History: Opposing the Will of God
\nEric Metaxas, BreakPoint.org, September 15, 2014<\/p>\n
Lift Up Your Heads: Von Galen and the Third Reich
\nChuck Colson, BreakPoint.org, January 25, 2011<\/p>\n
________<\/p>\n
Copyright (c) 2015 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. “BreakPoint” is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #22340]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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