Posted on 06/29/2012 4:11:28 PM PDT by wagglebee
We live or die by the health of the physical environment which we struggle to conserve. Just as crucially, we are nourished by an ethical environment, the moral oxygen of our human world.
In the beautiful words of Dr. Margaret Cottle, a colleague of mine, we have been standing among ancient trees, an old-growth forest of noble principle. It has been growing organically for 2,400 years, since Hippocrates, a “delicate social ecology of mutual support and protection” which forbids the killing of a patient.
Carter v. Canada , the judge-decreed legalization of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia in Canada, tries to take a chainsaw to that old-growth forest. Once it is gone, it will be gone forever. Plant some seedlings, but it will never be the same. Whether the prior Supreme Court of Canada ruling against this, and the clearly voted will of Parliament can be dismissed by a provincial court judge is now a topic of outrage.
What is notable and fascinating is how carefully this assault on our ancient and hard-won ethical environment has been planned. The door had to be opened, if only a crack, by using a story so compelling and a situation so extreme that ordinary people would be easily led by their compassion.
Carter v. Canada was at first only the tale of Lee Carter, an 88-year-old woman who was taken to Switzerland to die. The addition of likeable 64-year-old ALS victim, Gloria Taylor, four months after the lawsuit was launched, put meat on the bones of the case and has been a publicity triumph.
The general public thinks that the Carter ruling is only about appealing people like Gloria Carter with desperate terminal illnesses. Her lawyer, Joe Arvay, claims publicly that the case is only about a tiny number of people in clearly hopeless situations. This is a useful tactic to get one foot in the door.
It would be nice to know the final plan, and fortunately Jocelyn Downie, the architect of the whole strategy, spelled it out in 2008:
[T]here are many individuals whose lives are no longer worth living to them who have not been diagnosed with a terminal illness. They may be suffering greatly and permanently, but are not imminently dying. There is no principled basis for excluding them from assisted suicide.
Similarly, Arvay mused recently that his interest in the topic of euthanasia was sparked by seeing his mother “curled up in a fetal position for 5 years in a nursing home.” Hard to give consent when you are demented. Maybe the need for competence and consent needs the re-thinking that is being urged in Washington state right now. Ominously, Arvay made this comment after delivering an invited lecture about assisted suicide and euthanasia at a Vancouver hospital for severely disabled children.
People who qualify to die under Carter would appear to not require physical disability (though it must be expected “soon”), and they must have a “serious” illness, which may be defined as “without remedy” if available care is not “acceptable to the person.”
The suffering can be physical or psychological. (“Psychosocial” was disallowed in a burst of judicial restraint.) “Advanced weakened capacities.” “No chance of improvement.” The right number of hurdles to give some sport to the lawyers who will come after, but no problem jumping them if, say, you just stop taking your insulin: “Your honor, my client has had to thrust a sharpened tube of surgical steel into her person (see Section 7 of the Charter) four times a day for decades. How can the state force this agony to continue?”
Doctors have been free to abhor killing for 2400 years. It was a good run.
LifeNews Note: Dr. Will Johnston is the chair of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition of British Columbia.
This is the way the forces of Satan have ALWAYS succeeded.
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If these people want to die give them a gun and ammo. They can do the deed themselves instead of asking society to pay and participate.
Infanticide was banned in the Roman Empire in the late AD 300s, and suicide/euthanasia from the 400s.
Despite their pagan roots, Hippocratic principles were NOT widely practiced until Christianity took root, and Christian thinkers rediscovered Hippocrates, in the late ancient, early medieval period.
In pagan times Hippocratic oath following doctors were a small minority...
For the last 1500 years though, Christianized Hippocratic principles were THE standard medical practice in the Western world.
And in the past century the left has done EVERYTHING possible to eliminate these principles.
An obvious solution is to create a medical organization that has as its underpinning a new oath. Doctors, Nurses and other health care workers that join the organization swear to always support life and accept only natural death that does not dehumanize.
If others try to coerce them, they should report them to the organization, then refuse. If fired, then whoever tried to coerce them will be blacklisted, and members will no longer refer patients to them or their authority.
Their ethics are based on faith and morality, not the relative ethics of other medical people, nor government, nor employers or insurers.
The conclusion to their oath is that no one can compel them to kill, and that it is better to quit medicine or leave a nation than to submit and become part of the machinery of evil.
And membership in this organization should be made known to patients, that they have a choice for medical services of those that respect life, and those that offer death as a service.
I believe in the right to own a gun. I also believe in education. The elderly are our living history who are being euthanized because they are actually witnesses to the truth.
Suicide is a consequence of DEPRESSION which is curable.
http://www.suicide.org/elderly-suicide.html
Got a toothache? here’s a gun./s
We should offer that option to five members of the Supreme Court (only if they want it) and to quite a few others in what used to be our government who support ObamaCare and its Death Panels, and then decide if it’s a god idea for decent Americans.
“..Suicide is a consequence of DEPRESSION which is curable.”
Yes, it is. Plus, loved ones can do all they can to cheer an elderly person by visiting more, acting upbeat ourselves and getting them out.
And if we’re visiting at a nursing home, and we’re not ready to leave yet while our loved one is sleeping, we can visit another resident for a bit. I went up to one resident, who seemed to not know what was going on, because she only kept chanting “Please help me” over and over. However, I easily started a great conversaton with her, and would visit with her every chance I got.
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