Posted on 03/31/2015 9:05:39 AM PDT by wagglebee
March 30, 2015 (BreakPoint.org) -- In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled in Vacco v. Quill that there was no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide. Those of us here at BreakPoint recall how Chuck Colson and others breathed a sigh of relief.
But a lot has changed in 18 years. What was legally unthinkable then is oh so thinkable today. And even if the Court doesn’t reverse itself, at least eighteen states and the District of Columbia are contemplating following the lead of Oregon and several European countries, most notably the Netherlands and Belgium.
That’s why a vitally important Heritage Foundation paper by Ryan T. Anderson is most welcome.
The title says it all, “Always Care, Never Kill: How Physician-Assisted Suicide Endangers the Weak, Corrupts Medicine, Compromises the Family, and Violates Human Dignity and Equality.”
As Anderson says, the words of the Hippocratic Oath are “an essential precept for a flourishing civil society.” Here they are: “I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect.”
A society that legalizes intentionally causing the death of an innocent person cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be called “good” or “flourishing.” This is especially true when, as Anderson points out, the burden of this legalization falls disproportionately upon the weak and marginalized.
Anderson is correct when he points out that whenever physician-assisted suicide has been legalized, “safeguards purporting to minimize this risk [of killing people against their will] have proved to be inadequate and have often been watered down or eliminated over time.” Just think about what’s happening in countries like Belgium, which last year revised its law to cover children. It requires willful blindness to believe that it’s the child who will “choose” to be killed.
It requires similar willful blindness to disregard the potential impact of physician-assisted suicide on the practice of medicine. For starters, Anderson asserts that physician-assisted suicide “corrupts the profession of medicine by permitting the tools of healing to be used as techniques for killing.” In so doing, it “reduces patients’ trust of doctors and doctors’ undivided commitment to the life and health of their patients.”
Perhaps even worse, “the option of [physician-assisted suicide] would provide perverse incentives for insurance providers and the public and private financing of health care. Physician-assisted suicide offers a cheap, quick fix in a world of increasingly scarce health care resources.”
It undermines “social solidarity and true compassion” by making it more likely that people will come to “view elderly or disabled family members as burdens” and, just as bad, having the elderly and disabled view themselves that way.
Anderson is most profoundly correct when he writes that physician-assisted suicide’s “most profound injustice is that it violates human dignity and denies equality before the law.” It tramples upon the conviction that “every human being has intrinsic dignity and immeasurable worth.”
Any decent society must treat this principle as inviolable. Any decent society should respond to illness and suffering with “compassion and solidarity,” not a lethal dose of phenobarbital.
Reprinted with permission from Break Point.
Exactly!
B T T T
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[[Perhaps even worse, “the option of [physician-assisted suicide] would provide perverse incentives for insurance providers and the public and private financing of health care. Physician-assisted suicide offers a cheap, quick fix in a world of increasingly scarce health care resources.”]]
One question, if physician assisted suicide is so ‘cost effective’ then why are executions so dang expensive (not talking about the myriad lawsuits, I’m talking aobut the actual ‘procedure’ itself
the framework was laid long ago - when things like seatbalt laws were passed. remember the reasoning? if the government pays for your treatment (as it did in very few, extreme cases) then it had the right to force you to ‘protect’ yourself.
well if the payer has the right to control behavior, etc. it is only a small step to ‘if we pay the bills, then we have the right to pull the plug to save money for other needy patients’.
“That’s alright...You soon will be!”
Join us in praying for an end to euthanasia.
Four generations we were fighting against the people who practiced "euthanasia", and it was one of the more horrifying concepts our enemies had.
What has become of America that this is even considered?
The Right to Life is “unalienable” (stated in our Founding Documents) so any court decision that endorses “Euthanasia” or Abortion is totally unconstitutional.
As Cicero stated, the best way to collapse civil society is to destroy
“Just Law”-—and promote evil law.
We have had a cabal of Lucifereans who set up a bribing system (Leviathan)....they are bribing judges, bribing congressmen, inserting their people in positions of power, in publishing agencies, to control all content in newspapers (since early 1900s) to destroy this nation and Individual Natural Rights, corrupt the minds of children, so they can collapse this system of law, so they can control the whole world.
They can’t stand mature, masculine males who demand Freedom. (Constant emasculation (Bieberization, homolization) They have wanted “happy slaves” since Fichte (1810) noted the plan of the “Prussian” system of “education” was created to destroy Common Sense in the Common people (G.K. Chesterton) and create irrational, immoral “happy slaves”. They fill the minds up of children with lies and misinformation and sexualize them (Weimar Republic was a totally sexualized, vulgar, corrupted one)-—which collapses culture into a tyranny.
Toxic culture destroys formation of Virtue in children. Without Virtue, there is no Freedom possible (Socrates). Our schools are nothing but toxic, immoral, operant conditioning factories to create irrational, ignorant slaves for corporations and the State.
Flipping Good and Evil (sodomy and killing humans is now Virtue) is essential since the USA was the most Reasoned and most Virtuous with their Christian Ethics. Irrationality (”snow is black”) is being forced onto all our children by destroying true Virtue. Cultural Marxists targeted Christianity in Europe and America by controlling “schooling” (Prussian system)-—to destroy the possibility of Freedom and Individual Natural Rights from God. Conditioning our children into tribal minds devoid of character (control over base emotions so Emotions rule Reason).
I'd like to say that ...
A society that lets a person die that wants to die, is a good society.
A relative that lives in Dr. Kervorkian's neighborhood told me ... "People say that what Kervorkian is doing is wrong, but no one wants to see him punished."
Think about it.
And then it becomes alleviating suffering of those who are pained at your existence.
I couldn’t agree less.
Judge all you want, but you have no right whatsoever to CONTROL another person's personal decisions.
It has nothing to do with control.
Of course it is, but this isn't about "letting" someone die, it's about actively hastening their death.
A relative that lives in Dr. Kervorkian's neighborhood told me ... "People say that what Kervorkian is doing is wrong, but no one wants to see him punished."
And I say, "Thank God we don't live in a direct democracy." If something is wrong it needs to be punished, especially if it results in death.
Kevorkian had a very good PR machine, agents of Satan often do, but what he did was evil. The evidence suggests that he murdered people who were suffering from nothing more than treatable depression. Satan will almost always appeal to base emotions rather than logic or fact, that is what Kevorkian did and over a hundred people were murdered before his killing spree ended.
Think about it.
I have and I've come to the conclusion that you are, at best, a concern troll.
You left out (from the same Declaration of Independence sentence) the "unalienable Rights" to "Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."
Well said, wagglebee!
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