The Culture of Death is Heroin

The culture of death is like heroin: Once you start to mainline, it is never enough.

Consider the experience of the Netherlands. When euthanasia was quasi-legalized there by court order in 1973, access to mercy killing and assisted suicide were supposed to be limited to the very few. The killing would all be governed by euthanasia guidelines that, the Dutch people were assured, would protect against abuse. These included repeated requests, a lingering desire for death, second medical opinions, and a requirement that euthanasia was the only way to eliminate severe pain or suffering.

It hasn't turned out that way, of course. Since 1973--alas, with the general support of the Dutch people--Dutch medical ethics have fallen off a sheer vertical moral cliff. Doctors there now provide euthanasia/assisted suicide for the terminally ill who ask for it, the chronically ill who ask for it, people with disabilities who ask for it, and, according to several Dutch studies, even about 900 people per year of people who have not asked to be killed. The Dutch even have a name for non voluntary euthanasia--"termination without request or consent"--which is technically murder but is rarely prosecuted, and never significantly punished when charges are brought. For example, according to a 2003 article published in the British Medical Journal, a physician who had terminated the life of a nursing home patient without request received a one week prison sentence suspended for two years . But not to worry: The court claimed that this tiny fingernail tap was not merely "symbolic."

As readers of the CBC newsletter already know, Dutch doctors also engage in eugenic infanticide, which is also technically murder under Dutch law, but which is now deemed so respectable that the "Groningen Protocol" was published to govern its application--and it is well on the way to becoming the legal standard for eventual legalization.

Dutch doctors also assist the suicides of the depressed. This practice was explicitly sanctioned by the Dutch Supreme Court in 1993 in the case of psychiatrist Boutdewijn Chabot, who assisted the suicide of a patient--not because she had cancer, not because she was even physically ill--but because she was in desperate grief over the deaths of her two sons. The highest court in the Netherlands ruled that Chabot was right, that suffering is suffering and it doesn't matter whether the cause is physical or emotional--which of course, is logical once you accept euthanasia consciousness.

But even this wide-open killing license didn't satiate the Dutch death addiction. In 2001, when the Dutch Parliament formally legalized euthanasia, the Minister of Health suggested that elderly people who are "tired of life" but whose conditions do not qualify for euthanasia--as if that actually matters in the Netherlands--should have access to a suicide pill with which to kill themselves. And now, Dr. Chabot--the same psychiatrist who assisted the suicide of the grieving mother--has apparently contributed to a new how-to-commit-suicide guide. According to the Telegraph:

A scientific guide to DIY suicide is to go on sale in the Netherlands to help people end their lives quickly and painlessly. The book, the first of its kind to be published, is by a group of respected scientists and psychiatrists. It contains detailed information on using drugs as well as committing suicide by starvation, including the quickest and least painful way to do it. There are also chapters on the ethical and judicial questions for those who aid suicides. Its authors are also planning English, French and German editions.

Author and psychiatrist Boudewijn Chabot said: "Doctors learn little about this subject during their training. This book is for people who want to make their own decisions about ending their own lives."

What is remarkable is that the Dutch have publicly worried about their already high suicide rate--including a disturbing trend toward increased youth suicide. But what does any of this matter. Once a society takes the first culture of death injection, it will find that no matter how liberal the suicide/euthanasia rules, it is never liberal enough.

CBC Special Consultant Wesley J. Smith is also a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide.

“This practice was explicitly sanctioned by the Dutch Supreme Court in 1993 in the case of psychiatrist Boutdewijn Chabot, who assisted the suicide of a patient—not because she had cancer, not because she was even physically ill—but because she was in desperate grief over the deaths of her two sons.”

Even more striking was the case where the courts refused to convict a Dutch doctor for his role in euthenising a teenage girl who was suffering from... ANOREXIA. Therefore, she was not terminally ill, indeed, not really physically unhealty, but mentally ill.

She made a video tape, before her death, requesting to be killed, saying that since she was 12 she had anorexia and “had grown very slowly toward my death.” Apparently, the court was very influenced by this tape.

I thought she should have been removed from that doctor’s care, placed in a pyschiatric unit, and given treatment. Instead, she was murdered.

Importantly, I question whether it should be called a “Culture of Death”, instead of the “Loss of the Culture of Life”.

To explain, why was Dr. Frankenstein a character of ill repute in the medical community? He rejected the ethics of life, but not in favor of “science”, or to “defy death”, or so that some great and transcendental majesty would be discovered.

He rejected the ethics of life, *because* he rejected the ethics of life. He embraced no new ethos, he wanted to be outside of ethics. He reached from the moral into the immoral, but not to become immoral, but to become amoral.

This is a deadly important distinction, because many scientists and doctors today follow in the footsteps of Dr. Frankenstein. They seek to transcend ethics and morality, because they are convinced that such things should not “hold them back.”

But hold them back from what? Ethics and morality hold them back *only* from having either ethics or morality. They gain nothing by discarding them. All they do is lose. And while they might think they gain something intangible, they don’t.

If you put scientists in a room with a big red button, and told them they would destroy the entire world just by pushing it, many would push the button. And they would be disappointed that the world was not destroyed. This is the absence of ethics and morality.

Not just life loses its value, but everything loses its value without ethics and morality. Yet they seek this state of being. And the way they think it is achieved is by crossing over from morality to immorality. From ethics to criminality. From right to wrong. To balance these and other dichotomies, and by doing so, to neutralize them.

This then, is not a “Culture of Death”, it is a lack of, the loss of, the “Culture of Life”. They say that it is “scientific”, to do so. It is not.

Just in the 20th Century, there has been a complete collapse of medical ethics, time and again, across the world. Eugenics, treating humans as if they were animals, in most of the world’s “modern” nations. Inhuman experiments by doctors on humans in death camps. The infliction of disease and the denial of treatment, in things like denying children vitamins to cure pellagra, the Tuskegee experiment, and involuntary radiation testing on patients.

Right now, there are hospitals in several American cities that have been “authorized” to try experimental treatments in their emergency rooms, instead of treatments known to work. Scientists seek to make “near human” animals, sharing almost all the human DNA, on which to experiment, with absolute control over their lives and deaths.

Medical doctors are the worst Frankensteins, precisely because they can directly “play God” with human lives. But other scientists are close behind, less able, if not less willing, to be amoral, and to harm human lives.

It is important also to know that amorality seeks to expand its domain, and celebrates itself. It seeks to entice those who still have the vestiges of ethics and morality, into the “freedom” of inhumanity, cruelty, and unfeeling insensitivity. It seeks to violate rules established to keep it in check, and it says rules are “wrong”, because they inhibit the “freedom” of amorality.

It is no surprise that once permitted, euthanasia spreads unchecked. Among its practitioners, they see nothing as wrong in issuing themselves weapons with which to murder as they see fit, without hesitation or remorse. Even out in the public street, were they to see an old woman with a walker, to shove a syringe of poison into her neck for no other reason than whim.

Because in the absence of ethics and morality, all that remains is the action of whim. Why did you kill her? Why not? In life she was nothing important, and in death she is nothing important.

There is no “Culture of Death”, or really, there is no culture in inflicting pain, disease, and death. But there is no science or medicine in it either, because without ethics and morality, science and medicine are meaningless as well.

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