The Left’s utilitarian view of humanity — from Planned Parenthood’s baby butchery to Europe’s expanding euthanasia
If you were a psychiatrist and a chronically depressed patient told you he wanted to die, what would you do?
In Belgium, you might prescribe this vulnerable, desperate person a fatal dose of sodium thiopental.
Between October 2007 and December 2011, 100 people went to a clinic in Belgium’s Dutch-speaking region with depression, or schizophrenia, or, in several cases, Asperger’s syndrome, seeking euthanasia. The doctors, satisfied that 48 of the patients were in earnest, and that their conditions were “untreatable” and “unbearable,” offered them lethal injection; 35 went through with it.
These facts come not from a police report but an article by one of the clinic’s psychiatrists, Lieve Thienpont, in the British journal BMJ Open. All was perfectly legal under Belgium’s 2002 euthanasia statute, which applies not only to terminal physical illness, still the vast majority of cases, but also to an apparently growing minority of psychological ones. Official figures show nine cases of euthanasia due to “neuropsychiatric” disorders in the two-year period 2004-2005; in 2012-2013, the number had risen to 120, or 4 percent of the total.
Next door in the Netherlands, which decriminalized euthanasia in 2002, right-to-die activists opened a clinic in March 2012 to “help” people turned down for lethal injections by their regular physicians. In the next 12?months, the clinic approved euthanasia for six psychiatric patients, plus 11 people whose only recorded complaint was being “tired of living,” according to a report in the Aug. 10 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine. […]
What’s noteworthy about euthanasia in Europe, though, has been its tendency to expand, once the taboo against physician-aided death was breached in favor of more malleable concepts such as “patient autonomy.”
“What is presented at first as a right is going to become a kind of obligation,” Belgian law professor Étienne Montero has warned.
In 2013, euthanasia accounted for one of every 28 deaths in the Netherlands, three times the rate of 2002. In the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, one of every 22 deaths was due to euthanasia in 2013, a 142 percent increase since 2007. Belgium has legalized euthanasia for children under 12, though only for terminal physical illness; no child has yet been put to death.
The United States, like Europe, is aging, with all that implies for the spread of Alzheimer’s and other cognitive disorders.
The “right to die” advocates are dismissive of any slippery slope. A person has a right to die with dignity.
But what if a doctor doesn’t want to participate in dealing death to a patient? Does a doctor have the right to opt out?
Leftists say, “No.”
In Canada, the CMA is pressuring doctors to either kill people who request it or refer them to someone who will.
TORONTO — Doctors who object to helping eligible patients end their lives should refer patients to someone who would be willing and able to help make it happen, suggests the head of the country’s largest physicians’ group.
“We don’t support anything that’s going to impede patients from accessing a legal service,” said Dr. Chris Simpson, outgoing president of the Canadian Medical Association.
His comments follow the release of the results of an online consultation with doctors that found many “conscientious objectors” want the right to opt out entirely from any assisted death regime once the practice becomes legal in Canada.
Simpson said no physician should be compelled or coerced to participate in doctor-hastened death against his or her own personal beliefs. But whether those same doctors have an ethical obligation to refer patients to another professional willing to fulfill the patient’s request has become a flashpoint in the assisted suicide debate, the same way many doctors also resisted abortion and birth control.
The CMA is proposing that MDs who object to a request for assisted dying refer patients to an independent third party, recognizing that doctors “can’t just simply disregard the patient’s right to access a service they’re eligible for,” Simpson said.
You Will Be Made to Care Participate.
Such activists always are, as they slather the grease on the slope in front of God and everybody.
People always dismiss the “slippery slope” as a fallacy. That’s true only if the advocate for change advances a philosophical basis for stopping the proposed change at a given point. In other words, does the advocate for change draw a line somewhere and if so, why there? In reality, the Progressive Left admits no absolutes beyond personal convenience and the nebulous well-being of the collective. In reality, that’s nothing more than whatever those who wish to assert power over others desire to do at any given moment.
This is all just another part of The West’s determination to commit Slow Suicide.
Truly, Western Civilization has become a Culture Of Death.
Saint John Paul The Great [re-paragraphing and emphasis mine]:
Source: Evangelium Vitae
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae_en.html
I’m all for anyone who wants to die having a convenient & pleasant way to do so. The R. Budd Dwyer method leaves a mess for someone else to clean up – which is just rude – and frighteningly doesn’t always work.
And isn’t really available to NYC or NJ residents, who have more reasons to die than most.
But obviously, forcing a third party to kill you against their wishes isn’t acceptable. (To paraphase the ‘cake’ incident, “Just shut up and kill the lesbians already, hater!”)
Perhaps an over the counter “no morning after” pill is in order?
Remember that in Time Enough For Love there was supposed to be a suicide switch in every room? Right now pushing the lever for just about any candidate in a voting booth is a slow motion suicide decision.
Emphasis added because it makes all the difference.
SSM proponents’ attempted claim that it won’t lead to polygamy has always amounted to “because we say so.”
Yet that was how they liked to characterize opposition to SSM.
Philosophy itself suffered death at the hands of the slippery slope in common speech well over a century ago. In that respect the term philosophy today is kinda like the term culture: anyone can use it to name anything they like. Nowadays, people who are perfect non-philosophers say they have personal philosophies of a sort which demands a daily dose of a hamburger, or an apple (“My philosophy is to eat an apple a day!”). Little wonder then that no one seems to have any consistent idea what philosophy is or does: let alone that philosophy isn’t about the provision of a basis, but rather more resembles an unsatisfied and ongoing search for such a missing thing. Somewhere along the line people seem to have begun to assume that every problem has an answer. I’ve heard that we ought to blame Vico for this absurdity, but who the fuck knows?
Admittedly, I only ask for an answer founded in logic — and still get bupkus.
Of course, the college course I took in logic was offered by the philosophy department…
Though the following has little to do with the slippery slope as such, it might go some ways to explaining what’s absent here:
Antiphon (that’s an interesting name, no? kinda like “against-sound[ing]”, by the looks of it), Plato’s half-brother who Plato has made a character to secondarily recount his memorized version of the encounter between Parmenides, Zeno, Socrates and the ghostly presence of Anaxagoras (another interesting name: the prince of the market) in the dialogue Parmenides stands in for the bulk of us ordinary folk when he retreats from philosophy to his horses and horsemanship (Gulliver, anyone?) owing to, presumably, his recognition of the utterly inescapable weirdness of philosophy from up close and personal. If Antiphon, like us in this respect, couldn’t actually live in it, we can congratulate him at least for recognizing it and falling to silence. And there’s that Gulliver fella once more, emulating Antiphon.
Most of this business is simply lost to modern education, which evidently, is far superior, having found method.
…having found method and it’s madness.
There…FTFY.
No one can accuse Mr. Swift of lacking ambition. Just how much Greek literature did he draw from for that crazy travelogue?
Huh. I associate the prefix “anti-” with Latin, but like so much those togaed poseurs stole it from the Hellenes.
heh, dunno the answer to that McG, but would be willing to wager on “as much as he could get his hands on”.
The problem with traditional philosophy is that it often brackets out or devalues all the stuff that goes on in our consciousness that isn’t strictly rational (yes, I know, gross exaggeration). However, the alternatives, ala, Romanticism, existentialism, Dionysian primitivism, postmodern relativism, theologic submission, etc. have gained much of the spotlight lately. Either extreme is going to be unsatisfactory for all purposes.
“I would believe only in a God who could dance.”
~ Nietzsche
It’s a pun sort of play I made of Antiphon’s name though, not a straight account of it to that extent. The Liddell-Scott lexicon gives the plain word (i.e., not the proper name as such) the meaning “sounding in answer, concordant”, as in a call-and-answer song, I take it. Parallel to “strophe” and “antistrophe”, as opposing dancing movements of the chorus across the stage.
I don’t think that’s true about bracketing out or devaluing TaiChiWawa. Everything about us has to be accounted for from that Socratic point of view, but seeking each as what it is, rather than accepting some appetite or some such for what it isn’t. Reason, sure, for the philosopher is his principle, his archon, but all the parts are necessary to the whole.
I believe that intelligence and emotion are co-dependent. One must have experience to learn and every experience is an emotional event as well as an intellectual one. This is one reason I don’t think artificial intelligence will be soon forthcoming. Sometimes the logical thing is not the right thing.
(This is not an argument to your comment, sdferr.)
Then Nietzsche must have been so dumb as to think that a bored Jesus of Nazareth sat in the corner, waiting for his mother to ask him to turn the water into wine at Cana
By the by, these words added by Bob “. . . and it’s madness” appear to be already in sum and substance Nietzsche’s own criticism of modernity, not to mention those who came after him also in revolt against modernity, without, however, possessing a satisfactory answer to their own revolutionary problem — mass murder didn’t work, try as they did to make it work. In our day it looks something like the complaint of the French post-modernists, who more or less recapitulate the earlier recognition of the inadequacy of the Enlightenment as the crown jewel of the modern project. Maybe. Maybe, because those post-modernists seem to me to have aimed at obscurity more often than not.
To divert back to the post for a sec, I think this would be a good program to impliment in max security prisons. Maybe nightly announcements encouraging the murderous to do themselves.
Other than that, it ain’t real healthy for a civilized society.
I don’t have a clue what Plato thinks of the thing, so I’ll leave the side conversation to the more learned.
I haven’t read the thread but have been told by sdferr that these two pieces might fit here.
A Feb. 1941 lecture by Leo Strauss to the General Seminar of the Graduate faculty of Political and Social Science of the New School for Social Research in New York on the subject of German Nihilism. [pdf]
And a piece in the New York Review of Books by Freeman Dyson, “What Can You Really Know?“