Here is a repost of my earlier message to you that disappeared when the thread it was on was pulled:
The Death Culture in Florida
Our society turned into a right-to-die society when technological advances made it possible to sustain the life, of the shell of a body, beyond the point of tolerance of pain or beyond the point of measurable brain activity.
As a first world country, we do an amazing job of keeping people going physically, but we are truly lousy at providing any quality of life. We interfere with the life/death cycle by using extreme medical measures when, under normal circumstances, the person would just pass on to a better place. (As in the case of extremely premature babies...)
It was a logical step in the progress of man overall that we had to become a "right-to-die" society. We had to preserve the individual's right to hold up his hand and say, "No, I don't want chemotherapy." or "Never put me on a respirator".
It didn't take long for the greedy ones to step in and start calling something as simple as a feeding tube or an IV or rehabilitative therapy 'extreme medical intervention'. By doing so they were able to eliminate lives ahead of schedule to avoid draining their resources or their inheritances (materialism run amok!). And the churches and the people unknowingly sat back and let a few immoral judges make this leap into a new "death culture".
Once this radical new "death culture" was established, hospices began to spring up everywhere. It was natural. People dying and their loved ones are in an extremely emotionally vulnerable time of life. Once they are moved to hospice, they are easily persuaded to leave all their money to these death camps.
"But", you are screaming, "it is so much better now that there is hospice available!"
On the surface and in a few good small volunteer driven homes, perhaps you are right. But in the large death mills, non-profit or for-profit, it is all about advancing the theory that society needs to dump their "burdens".
Some religions, possibly with great foresight, will not allow any medical interference. Those of us who choose to accept the services of doctors need to acknowledge the risks that we are taking with this possibly unnatural level of interference.<