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Posted on 09/29/2015 5:36:27 AM PDT by wagglebee
September 25, 2015 (BreakPoint) -- Yesterday, Eric Metaxas told you about the recent approval of physician-assisted suicide by the California legislature. Citing the work of Rosaria Butterfield, he gave us an historical perspective on how we as a culture have arrived at this troubling moment.
Now today, I’d like to talk with you about what we can do, what we must do, to defend life to our friends and neighbors.
To start, we have to understand this: While Christians believe (or at least should believe) that all human life is sacred from conception to natural death, many of our neighbors don’t share that conviction.
But that doesn’t mean we are at an impasse. In fact, there are many reasons to oppose physician-assisted suicide even for those that don’t share our belief in the sanctity of human life. And these are the kinds of arguments we need to be ready to make, as Chuck Colson would put it, over the backyard fence with our neighbors.
A great place to start: focus in on the definition of words, especially “dignity” and “compassion.” These words are used to great effect by pro-euthanasia forces, but they’ve been redefined. “Dignity” went from meaning worthy of honor and being treated with respect to meaning little more than fully affirming one’s lifestyle choices.
And, “compassion”? Well, that one’s been really debased. The word comes from the Latin for “to suffer with.” The Greek New Testament word rendered “compassion” meant to feel something in your guts. Both captured the intense and very personal quality of true compassion.
But today, compassion has been reduced to, as Walker Percy wrote in his 1987 novel “The Thanatos Syndrome,” an abstract decency and humanitarianism which makes doctors ready to turn “their backs on the Hippocratic oath and [kill] millions of old useless people, unborn children, born malformed children, for the good of mankind.”
We already know that Percy was correct about unborn children. And the rest of Percy’s “prophecy” is on track toward fulfillment as well.
Ryan Anderson of the Heritage Foundation has written an indispensable report whose title sums it up well: “Always Care, Never Kill: How Physician-Assisted Suicide Endangers the Weak, Corrupts Medicine, Compromises the Family, and Violates Human Dignity and Equality.” In it, he shows how safeguards to minimize the risk of killing people against their will, “have proved to be inadequate and have often been watered down or eliminated over time.”
That’s exactly what happened in Belgium, which in 2014 revised its physician-assisted suicide law to cover children. As Eric Metaxas said on BreakPoint, “It requires willful blindness to believe that a child can ‘choose’ to be killed.”
And for the old? Well as Belgian law professor Étienne Montero observed, “What is presented at first as a right [to die] is going to become a kind of obligation.”
That’s because physician-assisted suicide “offers a cheap, quick fix in a world of increasingly scarce health-care resources.” Doctors, insurance providers, sadly even family members, are perversely incentivized to turn the tools of healing into techniques for killing.
Along the way, people will “view elderly or disabled family members as burdens,” and just as bad, lead the elderly and disabled to view themselves that way. And all this, in the name of “dignity” and “compassion.”
So this is what our neighbors must understand. Wherever physician-assisted suicide has reared its ugly head, “dignity” is reduced to an economic calculation, not an inherent quality that we all share. And there’s nothing “compassionate” about physician assisted suicide, either. Instead of suffering with someone, it merely insists they go away. Permanently.
Reprinted with permission from Break Point.
This is scary and true.
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The Holy Orthodox Church STRICTLY FORBIDS physician-assisted suicide!!!!
She upholds REAL dignity and compassion, NOT the fakey version peddled to us by the merchants of death!!!!
Physician assisted suicide is another step toward the death camps. Via creeping incrementalism a “worthless life” eventually becomes anyone who can’t work or is very depressed or who the govt deems politically unreliable. I can hear the college profs making those arguments right now.
I thank God that ‘right-to-die’ legislation was soundly defeated in the UK parliament.
We already have physician-assisted murder of the unborn, so
Why not?
There is no need for physician assisted suicide.
Anyone can, without a license, go to their local welding gas supply company and have a bottle of 99% pure Nitrogen delivered to their house (at least most gas companies). Add a hose and a plastic bag that fits over their head, anyone can off themselves without pain. However it is still suicide.
The only thing that “physician assisted” does is provide a fig leaf of covering for the act of killing oneself.
that all human life is sacred from conception to natural death,
Therein lies the rub: we do not experience natural death so much. Its more likely that the individual will eventually defeat the life sustaining systems folks find themselves hooked up to.
That I submit is NOT natural death. In a lot of cases its a cruel torture preventing someone from dying.
Too many old people are kept alive and I would submit to you, in a kind of misery, not at their behest but to assuage the survivors.
My wife’s poor mother barely has a glimmer of self, has no memory of 30seconds ago is incontinent and wheelchair bound. She is a poster child of the kind of fate that too many suffer. This is dignity? The poor woman would be so embarrassed and humiliated if she was aware.
The family in this case has decided to withold several medications that may allow her to pass when the Lord calls.
It is a real sticky ethical dilemma. I certainly do not want to see government intrude in the decision process or be involved in any way. But dang it...I do not want to be stuck drooling in my shoe in a corner somewhere for years because I won’t just die.
I'm sorry to tell you, you're right. Since Hubby's stroke, I deal with this reality every time we go out in public. Thank God for kind people who go out of their way to mitigate the effects of the jackasses who treat my husband like a useless eater.
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It certainly is!
That I submit is NOT natural death. In a lot of cases its a cruel torture preventing someone from dying.
Too many old people are kept alive and I would submit to you, in a kind of misery, not at their behest but to assuage the survivors.
Very well said. Keeping people alive because we can is not compassion. In many cases, it is simply torture.
My mother was ravaged by Alzheimer's. She could barely speak & what she did say was mostly incoherent. She could not feed herself. She could not walk. She constantly soiled herself. One of her great fears was she would end up that way and unable to do anything about it.
And some twisted people think that is preferable to death.
There are ghouls among us.
Deserves repeating - there is nothing compassionate about physician assisted suicide. It is a horror story. I would add that also non-Christians groups oppose this. I believe orthodox Jews are against it.
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