Thread by me.
In his new book, The Last Goodnights: Assisting My Parents with Their Suicides, lawyer and author John West publicly tells a story that most people would have kept silent. He does it so that one day others may be able to kill openly and without fear. That’s not how West puts it, of course, but I’m afraid that’s what it boils down to.
West’s parents were prestigious psychiatrists. As West wrote, “Neither was at all religious, but both had deep insight into the human condition. . . . And they knew what they wanted.”
What they wanted was to die “on [their] own terms.” When West’s father was diagnosed with cancer, he asked his son for help in taking his own life. In West’s mother’s case, “advancing cognitive decline” led her to fear that she would “turn into a bowl of Jell-O in her head.” A couple of weeks after West assisted his father’s suicide, his mother made the same request.
It’s hard to listen to West talk about his parents’ deaths, as he recently did on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show. As he describes it, when talking about their impending deaths, his parents kept resorting to euphemisms like “do the trick” and “achieve the goal.”
No euphemism, however, can do away with the stark reality of death and what West had to do to kill them. For instance, he had to wake his father, who was groggy from pain pills given to him by a hospice worker, in order to take the extra pills that would kill him. West admitted that his father might not have finished taking the pills had he, the son, not fed them to him. . .
Thread by me.
It occurred to me the White House might be forced to nominate radically pro-abort Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as Department of Health and Human Services secretary after news leaked last week it was pausing due to her loathsome reputation among pro-lifers. Fear of pro-abortion recrimination, pride, whatever.
But it never occurred to me a pro-lifer legislator would applaud the pick, never mind two.
But that's what happened when Sens. Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts issued a glowing joint statement congratulating their home girl:
It's an honor for the State of Kansas to have an elected official appointed to the president's cabinet. We are hopeful Governor Sebelius will be a voice for Kansas and rural America. ... We look forward to working with her on issues important to the state. ... Obviously we will have different viewpoints than the Administration on many issues. ...
And they proceeded not to name abortion as one.
The list of Sebelius' crimes against preborn humanity is too long for this column, but they follow three tracks, repeatedly vetoing pro-life legislation, fighting enforcement of existing pro-life legislation and developing long-term associations with abortionists and the abortion industry, the reasons for tracks one and two. . .