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Posted on 07/22/2015 6:15:31 AM PDT by wagglebee
July 21, 2015 (BreakPoint) -- A few weeks ago, I told you that the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage, had placed our culture on a well-greased slope. All that was lacking, I said, was for someone to give it a push.
Well, the pushing has begun in earnest.
Earlier this month, the Washington, D.C., City Council held hearings on the “Death With Dignity Act,” which was introduced by Council member Mary Cheh. Despite the positive-sounding title, the bill would make assisted suicide legal in the nation’s capital.
Under the bill, a person with a terminal diagnosis of six or less months can, upon the confirmation of two doctors, obtain a lethal dose of drugs, which they could then administer to themselves.
This kind of legislation is a terrible idea: As the Heritage Foundation’s Ryan Anderson has written, wherever physician-assisted suicide becomes legal, “safeguards purporting to minimize [the risk of killing people against their will] have proved to be inadequate and have often been watered down or eliminated.”
This is a well-documented fact, not an opinion. Yet at least eighteen states and the District of Columbia are considering legalizing physician-assisted suicide.
Why? The answer lies in Council member Cheh’s justification for the bill. This is important, stick with me: She told a local radio station that the issue “is basically a matter of choice and control and autonomy.” She added that “When I am facing impending death ... with whatever pain and lack of dignity that they involve, I may involve this.”
Choice. Control. Autonomy. Dignity. It’s hard to imagine four more seductive words in contemporary American culture. As Justice Kennedy intimated in Obergefell, autonomy—which for him requires control over the choices we make with our lives—is a prerequisite for dignity, whether we’re talking about whom we marry, or as Cheh and others suggest, when we die.
That prompts an obvious question: What about the people who are dependent on others for their care? In what sense can the intellectually-disabled and many of the physically-disabled be said to exercise “choice” and “control” over the lives?
The answer is “very little, if any.” And that leaves them, by Kennedy’s and Cheh’s criteria, without dignity.
That’s why some of the biggest opponents of physician-assisted suicide are those representing the disabled. These include Samantha Crane of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, who told the same radio station Cheh spoke to that people with disabilities “are facing a lot of messages that life with a disability—if you need a lot of care—is not dignified or worth living.”
“Not worth living.” Where have we heard that before? Well, I’ll tell you: the Nazis viewed the disabled as Lebensunwertes Leben, “life unworthy of life.” Between 1939 and 1941, more than 70,000 intellectually and physically disabled people were exterminated, the opening act in the Nazis demonic assault on the sanctity of human life.
Seventy years later, the Nazis may be the only example of evil all Americans can agree on. Yet here we are, borrowing a page from their worldview book! We’re embracing ideas about what gives meaning and dignity to human life, seemingly unaware of where those ideas can and will lead.
Friends, human dignity does not derive from what we can do, produce, or control. Human dignity derives from the fact that God made us in His image. All human beings have, by birth and breath, dignity. Period.
That’s why we must resist physician-assisted suicide and why we must never grow weary of pushing back against the twisted ideas about human dignity that make it possible.
Reprinted with permission from Break Point.
Amen!
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Assisted suicide and euthanasia: The Nazis tried that. It didn’t go well.
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See, the Nazi’s mistake was the failure to find a profit motive in selling off the dead body parts like Planned UNParenthood has.
Those that wish to end their life, do not need drugs to do so. Nitrogen Asphyxiation is 100% lethal and is painless and quick. There is no need for a doctor to be involved.
That's what I was thinking. Once killing becomes legal, grandma and grandpa are going to be coerced into dying a heck of a lot faster, because little Mikey wants his inheritance NOW!
I live in Germany....in Hessen, and I was sitting around doing some historical reading over the region and came to this topic.
It’s an odd topic. In the late 1800s....it was started out as a science, and the catch to this was that there were a number of low-intelligent people, who got into relationships and reproduced. Somewhere in the 1920s...before the Nazis came along....the scientists and doctors were in a pattern of taking possession of these people and putting them into state homes.
The facility at Idstein started out as such a place. Either you got sent there for stupidity or simply having bad behavior....it didn’t matter. Once in, you stayed.
Somewhere in the 1930s, the facility took on new missions. If any young gal got pregnant prior to any marriage....you’d likely be put on a truck in your village....taken over and an abortion was performed, then you were sterilized. Somewhere along 1937...they started to use euthanasia on people brought in, and were burning the bodies in the hospital burn facility. Smoke would rise up, with a certain smell, and the local village would know the whole business going on.
It took barely a year for the local Bishop to make a trip to Berlin and demand they shut down the whole facility. The fact that everyone there knew what was going on....made it pretty serious.
So, the Berlin folks thought about it,and decided he was right. They shut down the euthanasia facility. Then they took the personnel....split them up and sent them to numerous locations, and restarted the concept all over the European map. That’s how concentration camps were so quickly developed and progressed in such a short period of time. They had tested the concept near Idstein.
What is curious is the research done after the war. It’s been routinely pointed out in Germany that the percentage of low-intelligent people has drastically dropped since WW II. Course, this is due to efforts of euthanasia and sterilization. You can find all kinds of couples who got married either before the war or after the war, who never had kids. No one says much, but the high percentages probably have to do more with women or men being fixed and thus not reproducing.
Just a short comment over the historical angle to this.
Sure it did. For the Nazis.
Not entirely true. There is a very small subset of Americans who admire them.
Fair enough. But "human being" is not a term with self-evident objective meaning. Same as with the term "person," definitions may vary.
Do you have a reference for the notion that the German euthanasia program had “positive” effects in reducing the percentage of low-IQ people?
If you google up either Kalmenhof-institute or Hadamar...there are dozens of pieces out there, and a handful will simply note (it’s not a positive or negative) that society changed after WW II.
A lot of people around the region never knew about the forced sterilization. Women who got sent there....didn’t talk about it after the war.
I wouldn’t consider it a positive or negative...it is the consequence of this action. The same science crowd....if you through the readings...were active in the US prior to the war and did the same thing in the US....believing they were helping society in some form of way. All the Nazis did was buy into it and multiply it a hundred times over.
I think...if the war had simply been avoided, with the English chased out of France and Germany locking down the continent itself...within forty years...they would have decimated various cultures and societies throughout Europe and probably eliminated forty-percent of the population without any war effort. You can go and review Greek history from 1940 to 1945, and see a vast cut on population triggered by Nazi strategy.
I don’t need a law or politicians telling me what I can or cannot do in this regard. I have no plans to end up like my parents did - suffering & waiting around to die.
After they get this law, they then deliberately and intentionally withhold care from the elderly, or make it so (fornicating) expensive that many elderly decide to take the pill rather than become a burden.
btt
It seems to me that that in addition to challenging murder, there needs to be defenses created against the murder of those who reject being murdered.
That is, an *irrevocable* legal document that “no matter what happens”, either active or passive euthanasia is forbidden, and that any activities that can actively or passively kill are to be regarded as criminal homicide. And even if a criminal case cannot be brought, there should be a wrongful death lawsuit made.
This would first require a change in the law to create such an irrevocable doctrine. It would also require a legal fund be established to file lawsuits against those who conduct active and passive euthanasia.
Part of the law would be that hospitals could not forbid the transport of patients out of their control, which in past has been used to hold patients captive until a court can order them killed.
Lots of other details need to be figured out, but it would create the first of a series of obstacles to the murderers.
Thanks. I would suspect that nobody really wants to investigate whether Nazi eugenics actually did have positive effects. This is similar to the way nobody wants to consider the possibility that their human experimentation actually produced good scientific data.
Some of it did. My understanding is that several fields have ever since used some of this data, with sources carefully deleted.
The problem is that science, and eugenics is kinda sorta a science, is utterly amoral. Morality has to be imported into science from outside. But few want to face up to that, so they pretend any ethically objectionable experiments can’t have produced valid results.
indeed. It does not bother them to then blame guns for suicides
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