Assisted Suicide Meets Demographic Winter

grasstopsusa.com ^ | 01/27/2016 | Don Feder

[massmike]

I'm honored to be with you today at Faneuil Hall, where American history has been made over the course of almost 300 years.

I was thinking this morning – as I wasn't shaving – that I've been speaking for Massachusetts Citizens for life for 30 years.

Today, I want to talk to you about the latest threat to life – which is called assisted suicide or doctor-assisted suicide.

Proponents think that hitching the word "doctor" to death-on-demand will somehow sooth skeptics. I mean, if your doctor is helping you, how bad can it be?

But when a similar proposal was being debated in the British House of Commons last year (where it was rejected overwhelmingly), Dr. Philippa Whitford, a breast-cancer surgeon and Member of Parliament, told her colleagues, "I have never considered as a doctor that death was a good treatment for anything."

State-sanctioned suicide is particularly ominous when considered in light of a phenomenon known as demographic winter. As they used to say in the old Firestone commercials, this is where the rubber meets the road.

Demographic Winter refers to the worldwide decline of fertility, sometimes expressed as birthrates.

A fertility rate is the number of children the average woman will have in her lifetime. A rate 2.1 is needed just to replace current population.

Thanks to the Sexual Revolution, all over the world – but particularly in developed nations – fertility rates are falling through the floor. Worldwide, they've declined by more than 50% in less than 50 years. In the United States from 1960 to 1970, the average woman had 3.5 children. Today, the average is two, the lowest since we began keeping records in 1920.

This means fewer and fewer children born each year, which in turn will lead to fewer adults to do society's vital work, and fewer taxpayers to bear the burden of government. It also means more and more elderly, and fewer and fewer people to care for them.

If the U.S. has below replacement fertility, in Europe, it's well below replacement. If we are the ground floor, Europe is sub-basement. In the European Union as whole, the average fertility rate is 1.5. In Spain, Italy and Greece, it's considerably lower. In the next decade or two, these countries will begin depopulating.

Japan is a sign of things to come. A nation once known for population density now has a fertility rate 66% below replacement. It's losing roughly 300,000 people a year. Whole villages have disappeared. Suburbs around Tokyo are dotted with homes that have been permanently abandoned.

The factors driving Demographic Winter include contraceptives (worldwide, half of all people of childbearing age uses some form of contraception), late marriage, the failure to form families and the desire to have fewer children than our parents or grandparents, or none at all.

Not surprisingly, abortion has played a huge role here. Worldwide, there are 42 million abortions annually. Over the course of 25 years, that's roughly 1 billion abortions – or 14% of world population.

Along with falling birthrates we are witnessing what's called the graying of society. The Japanese are now buying more adult diapers than baby diapers.

In the year 2000, those 65-years-of-age and older represented 12.7% of total U.S. population. By 2050, they'll be 20.3%. During the same period, the oldest among us (Americans over 85) will go from 1.6% to 4.8% of total population – an increase of 330%.

What are we going to do with all of these old people? The answer to that question is what makes doctor-assisted suicide so very dangerous. We kill the unborn for convenience, though we call it compassion, why not the elderly?

In America, public policy is driven by clichés. Thus, what's designated same-sex marriage is called "marriage equality." Abortion is "a woman's right to choose." And state-sanctioned suicide is "death with dignity."

In law school I learned that hard cases make bad law. Legalized abortion was sold with back-alley abortions. Doctor-assisted suicide is being sold with pain and suffering, even though palliative-care has improved by leaps and bounds in the last 20 years.

With a burgeoning elderly population and a shrinking workforce, the consequences for social spending are scary.

In the Social Security System, which is (and I don't care what they tell you) pay-as-you-go, the ratio of workers to retirees was 4-to-1 in 2000. Today, it's 3.5-to-1. By 2030, in just 14 years, it will be 2.6-to-1. Unless we raise taxes to astronomical levels – which will send us into a permanent recession – or cut benefits to the bone, we'll be heading for a fiscal train-wreck.

For Medicare, the situation is worse. The worker/beneficiary ratio fell from 4.5-to-1 in 1965, to 4-to-1 in 2000, to 3.3-to-1 in 2011. It will be 2.8-to-1 in the year 2020 and 2.3-to-1 in 2030. When Medicare was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson 51 years ago, no one envisioned a day when slightly more than two people would end up paying for every recipient. In the words of Mr. Spock from Star Trek, "Captain, that does not compute."

Although they would never admit it publicly, even now, politicians and bureaucrats are looking for ways to shorten the lives of the elderly to cut costs. That's the dirty little secret of ObamaCare. As we head into the depths of Demographic Winter, holding down costs at the expense of the most vulnerable among us will become an obsession. In 2012, two of the administration's former health-care advisors who helped to shape the Affordable Care Act wrote opinion pieces in The New York Times. One, titled "Rationing health care more fairly," called rationing "inevitable." In "Beyond Obamacare," Steve Rattner frankly declared, "We need death panels."

In a 2009 article in the British medical journal "Lancet" – titled "Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions" (I'm not killing you, I'm allocating scarce medical interventions) – Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, another former White House medical advisor, said the decision of whether or not to withhold treatment should depend on such subjective criteria as one's "quality adjusted years" (quality of life adjusted by life expectancy) and "incremental value to society," which is to be "determined by the government," of course.

This reverses the natural order in a democratic society. Instead of the individual being served by the state, government determines a person's social utility and discards those who don't measure up.

At a 2009 Town Hall, when asked by a woman if her elderly mother would be able to get a pacemaker under ObamaCare, the president said she should tell her mother that: "You know what, maybe this isn't going to help. Maybe you're better off, uh, not having the surgery but taking, uh, the painkiller."

That should be ObamaCare's motto – "If you're over 60, you don't need that uh quadruple-bypass, pacemaker, chemotherapy, hip-replacement – take an aspirin instead." By the way, I doubt there are enough painkillers in the country to get us through the remaining year of this administration.

Enter doctor-assisted suicide. Not surprisingly, in Europe, assisted suicide is increasingly a code name for euthanasia.

In the brave new world of a declining workforce, a growing elderly population and soaring medical costs (we're told one quarter of all Medicare spending is in the last year of life), many will see doctor-assisted suicide as a green light for subtle coercion: The elderly will be told: "You don't have long to live." "You don't have to suffer." "Why be a burden on your family?"

The right to die will become a duty to die. How hard will it be for greedy relatives or doctors who think they're God to sell this to octogenarians?

Speaking to Cuban bishops, priests and seminarians in Havana last September, Pope Francis observed: "Children aren't loved. They're killed before they're born. The elderly are thrown away because they don't produce."

Declining fertility and aging populations will intersect with doctor-assisted suicide in ways we can barely imagine.

In 1992, P.D James wrote a novel called "The Children of Men," set in a future Britain where children were no longer being born. Because there aren't enough people left to care for them, the government arranges mass suicides for the elderly. Descriptions of these ceremonies make chilling reading, especially because they're so routine. I know it seems fantastic, far-fetched – but so did 42 million abortions a year, partial-birth abortion and the sale of fetal organs 42 years ago.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is 1973 for assisted suicide and euthanasia. The time to stop 1984 is before you get there, not after you've arrived.

[massmike]

Full title:

Assisted Suicide Meets Demographic Winter A speech by Don Feder to the Annual Assembly for Life – Faneuil Hall, Boston, January 24, 2016

[redgolum]

It will happen.

Demographic winter will happen, but it will happen to Christendom first.

Assisted suicide is routine now. Go to any large hospital or nursing home.

[sparklite2]

Faneuil Hall is full of super mutants. I’ve been there rescuing kidnap victims many times.

[Gen.Blather]

There is apparently a suicide kit consisting of a fitted plastic head bag and a cylinder of helium. You attach the helium to the bag, put the bag over your head and breathe normally. There is no discomfort as the discomfort is caused by CO2. You can’t tell you’re not breathing air so you just suffocate. Why is a law and a doctor required?

[Chickensoup]

The Living Will that I was given by my doctor did not ask the usual: Do you want to not have extraordinary measures to preserve your life if you are not able to recover from your illness or have Alzheimers?

Instead it asked whether you want to be alive if you are not able to recover from your illness or have Alzheimers?

Big difference.