Rubbish.
Our lives are not our own to take.
Dying is not a crime.
But asking someone to kill you is.
Hey, Thomas J. Lucente Jr, does a suicide terrorist have a “right to die”? =.=
You have the right to die.
You don’t have the right to conspire to commit murder.
Clear?
If someone is determined to kill themselves then there are few things that will stopped them.
However, this in not what this argument is all about.
They want government sponsored (paid for) places where people can go to have others kill them.
Once you start down this path, it is a short trip from voluntary to coercion to mandatory.
All you need to do is look how abortion is portrayed today.
I can see it now, a full service death palace, one side doing abortion the other killing the lame, old and poor. It will become your duty to die to make room for “the children”.
This is evil, pure and simple
“Dying is not a crime.” Murder is.
Nonsense. People, including the terminally ill, kill themselves in the other 54 states all the time.
Anybody who can use Google can find detailed directions on how to accomplish this for a few bucks at Home Depot.
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On a related note, there's a very legitimate case to be made for refusing treatment which is truly burdensome and futile. Gotta agree with no ventilator, no electroshock, no aggressive CPR when it would be a terrifying, rib-breaking experience for a fragile terminal patient who cannot benefit. However, that's not what Kevorkian and his ghoul-lawyer-allies were and are all about. They're about lethal drug overdoses prescribed by death-docs who aren't even qualified to diagnose depression.
And the only "protection" offered by laws like, for instance, the one in Oregon, is for the prescribing doctor, not the patient. The law protects the doctor from lawsuit, even if there's evidence of coercion on the part of a death-promoting heir (giving grim new significance to the saying "Where there's a will, there's a way.")
The drug-pushing doctor cannot be sued if he claims he acted in "good faith," a claim it is practically impossible to disprove in court, unless he actually took a bribe in front of a witness with a videocam.
Anyone who wants to commit suicide on their own can do so, and 30 minutes' worth of mousing around on the Internet can tell you how.
But don't insist on "authorization" or "participation" from Church or State or Medico or Politico. Surely in the name of Blessed Autonomy, a would-be suicider can take care of business without insisting on corrupting the political, legal, and medical professions.
A self-respecting suicider (I am not recommending this) should be responsible for himself. This "legalized" "physician-assisted" crap just puts more death-dealing power in the hands of the State.
Judging from our nation’s body of law, the ruling class wrongly believes the government does.
However, you own your body and, with that ownership, you have a God-given natural right to do what you will with it, even if that means ending your life.
That is the lesson we should take from the life of Dr. Jacob “Jack” Kevorkian, who died June 3 at the age of 83. As he once said, “Dying is not a crime.” Throughout the 1990s, Kevorkian advocated the right of the terminally ill to end their lives in a safe and painless manner. By his own admission, he helped more than 130 people take their own lives and eventually spent more than eight years in prison on a murder charge. Yet, little has changed since Kevorkian was actively pushing for right-to-die legislation. Today, only three states allow the terminally ill to humanely end their lives, Oregon, Washington and Montana. In California, the FBI is harassing 91-year-old Sharlotte Hydorn, who is selling mail-order do-it-yourself suicide kits. Apparently the federal government has nothing better to do than harass a nonagenarian for selling stuff anyone can buy at a hardware store.
Hydorn is not the only one, however. There are numerous websites selling materials and information on how to take your life. Lawmakers, including those in the U.S. Congress, are struggling now to determine what it means to assist. That question would be moot, however, if they accepted the fact that people have a right to die with dignity. It is inhumane for government to prevent terminally ill patients from safely and humanely ending their lives and forcing them to die lingering, painful deaths. We do not even force that fate on animals. I am a Roman Catholic, so I recognize that not all subscribe to the belief that a person has the right to die. Like religion, however, the decision to end your life is a personal one. No one is forcing those opposed to physician-assisted suicide to seek that option. If one wants to live a life of pain and suffering, that is his or her choice. In a free society, however, no one has the right to force that fate on others. When a person is suffering beyond all hope of recovery, subjecting that person to further suffering is not respecting life; it is simply cruel.
Here we are in the 21st century. It is time we leave our Dark Ages mentality concerning life and death behind us. There is a bigger issue at stake here than death.
Ultimately, this is a question of personal freedom. After all, everyone has a right to self-determination so long as it doesn’t interfere with someone else’s right to self-determination. This is the primary right due every individual in every circumstance regardless of who may be offended by it, so long as they are not harmed by it. Freedom is more sacred than keeping sick individuals alive against their wishes. Any restraint on liberty should be completely justified by the restrainers.
But no one has been able to forward a legitimate reason why physician-assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia should not be allowed.
There are those folks who oppose assisted suicide because of the potential for abuse.
But the state has used that argument time and again to assert its ownership over us: smoking bans, gun ownership bans and mandatory seat belt laws to name but a few. The medical community is quite capable of creating a set of regulations to govern itself in the institution of assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia.
America can look to Oregon for an example of a physician-assisted suicide law that works. In 2010, 65 souls availed themselves of this humane procedure.
Perhaps we should learn from the story of Percy Bridgman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who, at 79, was entering the final stages of terminal cancer. On Aug. 20, 1961, Bridgman shot himself to death, leaving a suicide note lamenting the fact that he had no better option available to him.
The note said, in part, “It is not decent for society to make a man do this to himself.”
Fifty years later and this indecent situation has not improved.
Sanctity versus Quality of life here. Apparently those of us who believe that we need to protect the sanctity of life have a “dark age mentality.” No, it’s just the correct philosophical premise. Chronological snobbery has nothing to do with it.
Lucente’s argument boils down to an emotional appeal that it is cruel to “force” someone to stay alive, and violates their right to “self-determination.” This is the problem with true-blue libertarianism. It is pursuing an abstract liberty that does not exist, and makes this the absolute pursuit of human government. The problem is that if we follow this reasoning, we fall into the reverse trap as the egalitarians in a way, and, also, we wind up advocating a philosophy that should wind up without a state at all. The state’s mere existence is a bane to a libertarian concept of “liberty” as embodied in the absolutized “non-aggression principle.” It’s liberty via law. Not some rash pursuit of some arbitrary pseudo-philosophical concept of “liberty.” This is no better than trying to pursue some rash concept of “equality.” Of course, most libertarians and egalitarians are moderated in their philosophy by reality, so they do not totally apply their rather simplistic philosophies to real-world scenarios.
Also, think about what Lucente is saying as far as the abortion lobby is considered. Does it not concede their main argument for abortion? Think about the horrible lives these unwanted children would have if we “forced” their mother to have them! Is it not the same thing he is saying with older people instead of the pre-natal?
Dr. Harold Fredrick Shipman (14 January 1946 – 13 January 2004) was a convicted English serial killer. A doctor by profession, he is among the most prolific serial killers in recorded history with 218 murders being positively ascribed to him, although the actual number is likely much higher.
After his trial, the Shipman Inquiry, chaired by Dame Janet Smith, investigated all deaths certified by Shipman. About 80% of his victims were women.
In 1983, he was interviewed on the Granada television documentary World in Action on how the mentally ill should be treated in the community.
H. G. Kinnell, writing in the British Medical Journal, also speculates that Dr. John Bodkin Adams “possibly provided the role model for Shipman”.
Dr. John Bodkin Adams (21 January 1899 – 4 July 1983) was an Irish-born British general practitioner, convicted fraud and suspected, but acquitted, serial killer. Between the years 1946-1956, more than 160 of his patients died under suspicious circumstances.
Dr. Jacob “Jack” Kevorkian (May 26, 1928 – June 3, 2011) killed an admitted 130 people, but was only convicted of one homicide. Kevorkian served eight years of a 10-to-25-year prison sentence for second-degree murder.
Importantly, perhaps the only reason that Adams, and later Shipman were caught, was because they attempted to fraudulently steal from their victims. Had they been more discreet in doing so, or murdered solely for the joy of murdering, they would likely have never even been suspected of homicide.
Which raises the question of how many other physicians, and other medical caregivers are out there, who have committed, and continue to commit murder, with little or no chance of being caught?
And would they stop killing if what they did was effectively legalized?
“The note said, in part, “It is not decent for society to make a man do this to himself.””
No, it is not decent for society to let a man do that to others.
Why is it so bad for this man to shoot himself, but so noble to ask someone else to shoot him?
Why involve someone else in your death? You want it, take responsibility for it.
G-d gives us all the rights we have. The very word we use in this case a “right” comes from “rights and wrongs”. Rights are things that men at times have the duty or necessity to do. Wrongs are those things that they have a duty to their G-d NOT to do.
G-d grants us life, WE do not own that life, we cannot rightfully end it by our own choice. Suicide, assisted suicide — these are wrongs.
We, acting with others also have a duty to establish systems of Justice which include enforcement of G-dly moral codes, such as they may be needed. The difficulty of that is obvious, as it is a duty that requires taking on a LOT of power over others. Ideally we allow people to make their own mistakes as much as we can, but in times and tempers of a society, more forceful measures may be needed.
In an individual’s life one can not always avoid very difficult situations, nor can a society.
FreeRepublic supports the right to life. There is no such thing as a "right to die" and there's really no place for its promotion on a pro-life, pro-God, pro-family website.