[SoldierMedic]

This absolutism implies that depressed patients should be assisted to commit suicide when they make that decision. Release mentally ill patients to roam naked in the middle of winter.

You must have missed the part wher I said "If I'm of sound mind". A depressed patient is not of sound mind, nor is somebody who is mentally ill. If they lack rational judgement, the option of suicide should not be available.

As to the slippery slope: I recall while doing research for a debate on socialized medicine that in the US doctors are more aggressive to keep the patient alive than doctors in Canada or Germany (Those were the 3 countries compared). I'm going to assume that doctors in Germany act similar to other doctors in Europe, and say that American doctors already work more aggressively to treat than do doctors in Europe.

I do not see American doctors suddenly working less hard to keep the patient alive just because there is suddenly this 'easy out' from treatment of the terminal. However, as a safeguard from medical apathy, we can look to that failed system in Europe and improve upon what isn't working.

[sgtyork]

A depressed patient is not of sound mind, nor is somebody who is mentally ill. If they lack rational judgement, the option of suicide should not be available.

So what you are acknowledging is that there ARE cases where the interest of the state in preserving LIFE (or as our founding fathers said ...”the right to life, liberty...” —informed by the judeo-christian world view) outweigh the civil rights of a patient/citizen.

Since you and I share an AMEDD background, I will share that I took a course on Medical Law via correspondence from Ft. Sam years ago. I remember there were a series of cases where the state will overrule a citizen’s civil rights to protect life. For example, forcing medical care for minors over the religious objections of parents.

(parent’s )...rights must yield to the State’s parens patriae interests in protecting the health and welfare of the child.

http://www.cqcapd.state.ny.us/newsletter/74cclong.htm

So — “The side based upon civil liberties” isn’t a sufficient answer is it?

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...socialized medicine that in the US doctors are more aggressive to keep the patient alive than doctors in Canada or Germany....

And why the difference?

Is it perhaps because American doctors are more religious than their counterparts in those post-Christian countries?

http://www.uchospitals.edu/news/2005/20050622-religious.html

Survey shows that physicians are more religious than expected
June 22, 2005

The first study of physician religious beliefs has found that 76 percent of doctors believe in God and 59 percent believe in some sort of afterlife. The survey, performed by researchers at the University of Chicago and published (early online) in the July 2005 issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found that 90 percent of doctors in the United States attend religious services at least occasionally, compared to 81 percent of all adults. Fifty-five percent of doctors say their religious beliefs influence how they practice medicine.

also

Physicians’ Religiosity and End-of- Life Care Attitudes and Behaviors
http://www.mssm.edu/msjournal/71/71_5_pages_335_343.pdf
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You and I probably share the experience of living in a country where human life was cheap. How do we avoid becoming a country like that?

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDQ2OTIyZmVlNzE0OGJhOWVjZTQyNDE3NGM5NTM5OTM=

In effect, he worries that Europe as a whole is indifferently slipping into vegetable life, while its elites clear away any visions of angels that would interfere with their cultivation of an elegantly Godless Continent.

Weigel contends that Europe’s current demographic and cultural barrenness is the result of a great civilization’s abandonment of its longstanding source of self-comprehension and advancement.

Weigel consistently emphasizes that “Christianity taught European man his own dignity” and, in turn, that it proposed to him how best to be responsible and virtuous in forming societies organized to reflect and secure the inherent individual liberty of all. With severe precision, he argues that Christianity’s omission from the EU’s preamble exposes Europe’s abandonment of a morally regulated democratic sensibility for an emptily procedural equivalent.

http://freekorea.us/?p=5970

U.N. Envoy: N. Korea Sends Handicapped to Camps
October 23, 2006 at 11:01 am · Filed under Human Rights, “United” Nations

Since I began blogging about North Korea, one of my core philosophies has been that nukes, diplomacy, and human rights aren’t logically separable. That’s because you deal with governments that possess a basic regard for human life differently from those that lack one. Governments in the first category share our desire to preserve life by avoiding war. Governments in the second category seek only to preserve and expand their own power; their motivations are not like our own. This distinction has been lost on plenty of people who mirror-image the North Koreans as fundamentally reasonable. If this doesn’t tell us just what we’re up against, I don’t know what will.

The North Korean government rounds up disabled people and sends them out of the capital, Pyongyang, to special camps, where they are sorted by handicap and subjected to “subhuman conditions,” the United Nations has reported.

Vitit Muntarbhorn, a special UN rapporteur for human rights in North Korea and the author of the report, cited reports from defectors who said the mentally disabled were sent to camps known as “Ward 49.” Other camps exist for dwarfs, who may marry but are barred from having children.