By BRIAN CLOWES
“There will be casualties” — Australian euthanasia activist Dr. Philip Nitschke.
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The Final Step: Accepting
And Accommodating Evil
After decades of struggling with the euthanasia issue, it appears that the government of the Netherlands is in the process of accepting reality. It has given up attempting to place any meaningful limits on either euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide.
This, sadly, is the inevitable and ultimate result of permitting “just a little bit” of evil at the beginning — it acts like a gallon of filthy black motor oil that is poured into a clear pond. Once the oil is out of its container, it spreads relentlessly until the entire pond is ruined, and there is simply no holding it back.
In the early 1970s, nobody could have imagined that children would become the targets of the euthanasiasts. The Dutch Health Council (Gezondheidsraad) is the official medical society advising the Dutch government. As far back as 1988, this body proposed a “Model Aid in Dying Law” that would allow any child aged six and older to make a death request.
According to this model law, if the child’s parents objected to the decision, the child could present himself to a special aid in dying committee for a final, binding decision on his request for assisted suicide. According to the model law, “Minors have the right to request aid in dying whether or not their parents agree.”
Note that the child would not have to be terminally ill, or in fact, ill at all — a teenaged boy who is depressed over losing his girlfriend or being cut from the football team would no longer have to drown or shoot himself; he could be executed “safely and legally” in a Dutch euthanasia clinic under this proposal.
A seven-year-old girl who was being teased by her classmates at school for being plump could be “put to sleep” as well — and the first her frantic parents would learn about the situation would be when they received a bill from the “obitorium” for “services rendered.”
Why the Dutch Health Council attempted to place limits on euthanasia by proposing a detailed procedure for it is a total mystery, since euthanasia practitioners have widely ignored all such limitations so far. Even newborn babies are not spared from the needle, as we have seen in the case of three-day-old Baby Rianne, who suffered from hydrocephaly, spina bifida, and leg deformities.
The situation in the Netherlands has become so bad because leading Dutch pro-euthanasia campaigners believe in a variant of the “it’s my body!” slogan so beloved by pro-abortionists. Bioethicist Wesley Smith quotes Australian pro-euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke, who said that:
“My personal position is that if we believe that there is a right to life, then we must accept that people have a right to dispose of that life whenever they want. . . . So all people qualify, not just those with the training, knowledge, or resources to find out how to ‘give away’ their life. And someone needs to provide this knowledge, training, or resource necessary to anyone who wants it, including the depressed, the elderly bereaved, [and] the troubled teen.”
Simply declaring euthanasia a “fundamental human right” gives pro-euthanasia activists the excuse they need to crush all remaining opposition. As always, the Culture of Death prattles on endlessly about how people should be able to follow their consciences regarding euthanasia — but then denies that right to those that oppose it.
Priests in the Netherlands who refuse to celebrate a Mass of Christian Burial for people who willfully elect euthanasia — that is, for those who rejected the Church’s teachings on life but who want its blessings in death — are subject to threats and vilification in the press. Priests are not the only target; the Dutch Medical Disciplinary Board has reprimanded pro-life doctors for refusing to kill their patients.
The gross injustice of enforced cooperation with evil is certainly not limited to the Netherlands; in neighboring Belgium, the Grey Nuns of Sint-Annendael refused to allow a lethal injection euthanasia to be committed in their nursing home in 2016. A Belgian court found the Grey Nuns guilty of discrimination and ordered them to pay the family of the woman who wanted to be euthanized $7,000. Public opinion was decidedly against the Grey Nuns, who were repeatedly accused of “meddling in secular affairs.”
It appears that Dutch and Belgian doctors, who resisted the Nazis because they did not allow “freedom of choice,” are now committing exactly the same injustice against those who oppose euthanasia.
And, of course, if euthanasia is a “fundamental human right,” then it should be as widely available as possible. Right to Die-Netherlands (Nederlandse Vereniging voor een Vrijwillig Levenseinde, or NVVE) recently demanded that all restrictions on euthanasia be dropped, and that anyone at all (with no age limit) be allowed to kill anyone else for any reason and at any time, with no prior notice given to any government agency.
How police would distinguish between acts of euthanasia and other forms of homicide — such as outright intentional murder — is apparently of no concern to NVVE. The group is also pushing hard for a “peaceful pill” that anyone can keep in their home and use at their own discretion to kill themselves (kind of a more radical form of “emergency contraception”).
Of course, anyone who is feeling temporarily depressed could take the pill in a momentary lapse of sanity, a situation that can usually be alleviated by counseling.
The Numbers. It is interesting to consider what impact Dutch euthanasia policies might have if they were enacted in the United States, as our home-grown pro-euthanasia groups are demanding.
From the first full year after euthanasia was legalized in the Netherlands (2002) to the end of 2015, there have been an estimated 53,205 cases in the country. If this number were scaled up to the population of the United States, we would have had nearly a million euthanasias committed in this nation over the past 14 years, with about 142,000 more each year at current rates in the Netherlands — a number greater than the combined deaths caused by breast cancer, homicides, suicides, and traffic accidents annually.
At this rate, euthanasia would claim twice the rate of annual casualties as we suffered during World War II.
At the current rate of increase, there will be more than 10,000 euthanasias annually in the Netherlands by the year 2020. As a proportion of the population, this would translate into about 188,000 per year in the USA, making euthanasia the third leading cause of death in the United States — behind only all cancers and heart diseases.
Additionally, the Dutch government itself estimates that euthanasias are under-reported by 23 percent. On top of this, the government’s annual report on euthanasia does not include killings that do not follow guidelines (those performed without consent).
Also ignored is the practice of “deep sedation” (“slow-motion euthanasia”), where doctors simply sedate patients into permanent unconsciousness and let them die of starvation and thirst over a period of ten to 14 days. The practice of deep sedation is becoming more and more popular in the Netherlands and, as far back as 2006, exceeded the number of formal euthanasias.
Wesley J. Smith has said that “I suspect that Dutch doctors are switching euthanasia methods because in formal euthanasia, they have to be present at the bedside at death. With euthanasia, they watch as the killing actions they take terminate life. With terminal sedation, they don’t have to be present.”
Finally, the official government statistics do not include assisted suicides, where a medical professional or other person simply provides the method of killing, instead of injecting the patient themselves. And, of course, since such practices are at least somewhat controversial in the Netherlands, eugenic infanticides are not included.
All of these facts and figures should convince a logical and sane person that, indeed, euthanasia, like other evils, always begins with “an infinitely small, wedged-in lever.” For this reason, euthanasia should never be permitted, even in the most extreme of cases.
If we think that euthanasia a la Holland would be a good thing for American society, all we have to do is nothing — and it will continue to spread like a cancer all over the world. Physician-assisted suicide has already been legalized in California, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington, and was recently legalized in Canada, completely without religious freedom exceptions.
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