Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.
The focus this time: Who’s really crazier? The killers or the killed?
First, a little mood music:
Carrying on…
Killing patients has become so normalized, we are entering a danger zone where no one will be safe.
“Our good friend in these parts, health-care-policy expert and delight Sally Pipes, CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, writes in Forbes:
“‘Advocates say these laws spare the terminally ill from unnecessary suffering. But a closer look at Europe and Canada—where physician-assisted suicide has been legal and common for years—paints a darker picture. Far from providing peace to terminal patients, these laws are often used by government-run healthcare systems to nudge sick patients toward ending their lives.’
“In writing about the push for assisted suicide, she quotes from a friend of some of us, who has been mentioned here before. The column opens:
“‘Dovie Eisner was born with a rare genetic condition called nemaline myopathy. He requires a wheelchair and has a host of other health problems. Last year at one point, he stopped breathing, passed out on the street, and was taken to the emergency room.
“‘“I was alive—thanks to the determination of law enforcers and local medical personnel to keep me that way,” Eisner wrote recently in UnHerd. But, he warns, a law being considered in his home state of New York “threatens to undo this presumption in favour of lifesaving” that motivated first responders to keep him alive.
“‘The bill, called the Medical Aid in Dying Act, would allow mentally competent adults with six months or less to live “to obtain a prescription that would put them to sleep and peacefully end their lives.”’
“Dovie, as I’ve mentioned, has been in a coma since shortly after his piece was published on Unherd and a version was picked up by the New York Post and later the Free Press. Thanks be to God his devoted parents are his advocates, treasuring his precious life. In other circumstances, given the priorities of the medical industry today and a culture that seems so allergic to any kind of suffering (I hate it, too, but it’s part of life) that it would entertain the possibility of assisted suicide for eating disorders ever being appropriate – Dovie would be in exactly the danger he worried about.”
Suicide hotlines and other such resources have traditionally been about preventing suicide. Now, Scotland is looking to prohibit preventing assisted suicide.
“Assisted suicide is not yet legal in Scotland — I have traveled there three times to fight that agenda — but it is a looming threat again. And now, an amendment to the legalization bill has been proposed that would prohibit prevention efforts at or near places where suicidal people’s lives would be ended. From the ADF International press release:
“‘A Scottish parliamentarian and member of the Health Committee, Patrick Harvie MSP, has proposed an amendment to Scotland’s controversial “assisted suicide” bill that would criminalise discussion of suicide prevention within a large, undefined public area surrounding any building where an assisted suicide might take place.
“‘The vague proposal would forbid any attempts to “influence” a person’s decision to undergo an assisted suicide, such as through conversation with a family member or the display of a suicide prevention poster.’”
In Canada, the only way to mentally ill people from killing themselves is to have a doctor help them instead.
“A leading MAID advocate argued to parliamentarians last month that Canada must legalize assisted suicide for the mentally ill, lest those same patients commit suicide.
“The statement was made at a March 24 parliamentary committee debating the legalization of MAID for Canadians whose ‘sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness.’
“Jocelyn Downie, a leading MAID activist since 2004, warned that if the federal government keeps excluding mentally ill Canadians from accessing assisted suicide, the result will be more mentally ill Canadians dying by suicide.
“‘What will happen, if there is an extension or an exclusion, is that people will die by suicide,’ she said.
“The argument is not a new one. In fact, it’s been at the core of the Canadian assisted suicide regime since the beginning.”
TTFN.
