Posted on 06/14/2011 12:44:32 PM PDT by libertycause13
Who owns your body?
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.”
(Excerpt) Read more at thinkfree.freedomblogging.com ...
No relativism necessary.
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?
You forgot the green “food” coming out the back door.
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.
The blog is a libertarian blog. That explains a lot as they are NOT conservatives.
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.
Ditto that...they're really crawling out from underneath the rocks lately....pure evil is on the march.
Amen. I completely agree with you.
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Edited on December 15, 2010 10:09:46 PM EST by Jim Robinson. [history]
One more time:
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I'm going to keep an eye on this troll, my hunch is that he will be pushing for sodomites to be able to "marry" each other in the not too distant future.
This article went beyond suicide and went into physician assisted suicide, which is IMHO zot worthy, especially from a serial thread poster who never responds to defend his position on the forum.
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.
EXCERPTED! LOL
I have no complaint if a good conservative blogger posts his own material to FR, not as an excerpt to drive hits and discussion back to his blog, but rather to impart useful information to OUR readers and to promote and join in on the discussion and conservative activism HERE on FR.
If a blogger can’t or refuses do that, and if he constantly complains or fights with our participants over it, then I’d just as soon he doesn’t post here. It’s not my job to make his content or his presentation or cooperation acceptable to our readers. That’s his job. And if he cannot do it or refuses to do it and continues posting brief excerpts only and obviously attempting to draw away our participants while loudly complaining about it, then I have no sympathy for his complaints and the more apt I am to ban his account and blog.
Furthermore, I’m not big on “rules.” You won’t see me posting rules for bloggers. The rules for bloggers on FR are the same as the rules for everyone else. If you are a good conservative activist and are willing to work with US on OUR goals and causes and not against US, then you’re welcome to post to FR. But unless we say otherwise your blog material should be posted to our bloggers forum and it would be best if you do not excerpt your own material and if you would actually join in on the discussion here on FR. We’re not really that interested in driving OUR traffic to YOUR blog. But if our readers see that you post useful information then they might start reading your site and that’s fine by me.
You have the right to die. You even have the right to commit suicide. What our society does not permit is the right to kill another human being and claim “assisted suicide” as a murder defense.
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Excellent observation.
Falling afoul of one faction on a site may be survivable.
Falling afoul of multiple factions is universally unsurvivable.
Make your time.
Hit and run...
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