Posted on 08/11/2007 11:40:08 AM PDT by wagglebee
The state of Oregon legalized a form of assisted suicide in 1994, but its neighbor to the south, the nation's most populous state, has no such provision. Efforts in California to pass legislation allowing assisted suicide have failed five times over the past fifteen years. California has adopted liberal legislation on any number of controversial issues, but not this one. Why? Assisted suicide proposals have been thwarted by disability rights activists.
The logic of the disability rights movement is easy to understand. Once a society adopts a right to die as a matter of policy, a duty to die cannot be far behind. This logic is already evident when it comes to babies born with Down syndrome. Among many doctors and ethicists, the question has shifted from the right of parents to abort a baby diagnosed with Down syndrome to a duty to abort.
These doctors and ethicists frame the question this way: What right do you have to bring such a child into this world when we already face huge social costs of health care and face scarce resources? This is the logic of the Culture of Death, but it is a logic now argued rather openly.
Disability rights activists understand that this same logic threatens persons with disabilities. When does the argument for a right to die morph into an argument for a duty to die? The question is not merely a matter of intellectual interest. It is a question of life or death.
The Los Angeles Times reports that a bill modeled on the Oregon legislation failed to make it out of a General Assembly committee in June. As the paper explained:
Many disability rights activists contend that the increasingly cost-conscious healthcare system, especially health maintenance organizations, inevitably would respond to legalized suicide by withholding expensive care from the disabled and terminally ill until they chose to end their lives.
Paul Longmore, a history professor at San Francisco State University, argued that assisted suicide would lead to inequities and would not be limited to those with a terminal illness. "Our concern is not just how this will affect us. Given the way the U.S. healthcare system is getting increasingly unjust and even savage, I don't think this system could be trusted to implement such a system equitably, or confine it to people who are immediately terminally ill."
His concerns are clearly justified. These patterns are already clear in countries such as the Netherlands, where the so-called "Dutch cure" now includes policies for infanticide when a baby is born with severe abnormalities. Professor Longmore is also right when he asserts that the grounds for assisted suicide will be broadened beyond what is sold to the public when the legislation is adopted. A look just to the north will be sufficient to prove that point.
Even if legislation could protect those with disabilities from the threat of involuntary elimination, how long will it be before the disabled, the elderly, and others requiring extra care begin to wonder if their loved ones would not be better off with them gone?
Calls for assisted suicide arise at the intersection of human despair and political opportunity. The absence of a Christian worldview leaves personal autonomy as the foundation of ethical choice. Death becomes, of all things, a matter of individual rights.
The only real alternative to this logic is the framework of the biblical worldview -- a worldview that understands every single human life to be sacred, every individual to possess full human dignity, all life to be a stewardship, and death to be a matter for God, not we ourselves, to decide.
Make no mistake. When death is claimed as a right, it will soon become a duty. You don't have to be in a wheelchair to see where that leads.
Disgusting, but 100% true.
Pro-Life Ping
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Quasi-Baptist Ping (the author is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY).
How have YOU been feeling lately
Baptist Ping.
I can’t remember which one, but one of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels featured what he called “Ethical Suicide Parlors”. And, yes, we will soon forget that was fiction.
Vonnegut was a big leftist, but his stuff did make you think.
“These doctors and ethicists frame the question this way: What right do you have to bring such a child into this world when we already face huge social costs of health care and face scarce resources? This is the logic of the Culture of Death, but it is a logic now argued rather openly.”
This is nothing more than government agenda to justify murder in order to reduce Medicaid costs. They know the vast majority of people with disabilities will be a “drain” on it.
My question is what right do they have to sentence a less fortunate individual to death without even committing a crime? We let murders, who know what they’re doing, escape punishment all the time. But woe to you who can’t communicate and are physically and mental disabled. Hitler must be proud! Here’s a hardy Sieg Heil for the states of Oregon and California!
“Quasi-Baptist Ping (the author is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY)”
He’s a member of my church—
I was much younger when I read his stuff. I wonder what I’d think if I were to bother to read it again?
I meant that he is a prominent Southern Baptist, but that this commentary is not about Baptist issues anymore than it is about Catholic or Jewish issues.
It is an EXCELLENT piece and one of the best and most concise I’ve ever read on the subject (and I’ve read hundreds). So, please tell him that at least one Catholic appreciates his thoughts on this subject that threatens all of us.
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are all giant Ponzi schemes that were predicated on the assumption of steady and predicable population growth. The post-WWII Baby Boom put a strain on this, but it still would have worked. The problem is that in 1973, the Supreme Court facilitated the murder of 50 million future taxpayers. This is why these programs are in so much trouble and this is also one of the big reasons that many are so willing to allow an uninterrupted flow of illegal aliens into our country.
Only the very rich and politicians will be alive to a ripe old age...with their private care.
No two ways about it. You combine this ruthless utilitarianism with government-run healthcare and inevitably the elderly, disabled and chronically ill will be made into Soylent Green for the “Greater Good.”
What right does anyone have to kill what God has created?
The absence of a Christian worldview leaves personal autonomy as the foundation of ethical choice.
...and the people exercising their autonomy will be the strong over the weak.
Not California. We've fought off this beast several times.
Exactly. Very well stated.
ping
There already is a duty to die, masquerading as a right to refuse extraordinary care. All you have to do is claim that some basic necessity of life (like food and water) is extraordinary care, and accuse your victim of being morally opposed to it, even if all the evidence proves otherwise. The accusation is sufficient to carry out the task of killing them. We do it several times a day, all across the country. Actually, you can skip the step of claiming food and water are extraordinary care. That’s already been accepted in every state. And you can get around the requirement to accuse the victim of being morally opposed to food and water, by pointing out the established “fact” that they would be, if they weren’t too incompetent to know what’s good for them.
Yes, we already have a duty to be killed. The question is, how far are we going to advance that duty before we wake up?
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