The social engineers of the Long March insist at every turn that there is no way, no how, that their latest putsch will create a slippery slope that will lead to more, and more dramatic, changes. More than two centuries after Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, the smug mobs of “progressivism” still refuse to learn the lessons of history. Instead, they march blindly on, in search of their latest “progressive” fad.
Such a fad is the ongoing mania for allowing doctors to kill patients. Again and again, its advocates staunchly deny that crossing this particular Rubicon will set society off on another slippery slope. Even as it does. Once society deems it acceptable to medically kill people, it’s not long before it becomes okay to medically cannibalise them.
Once we deem certain categories of people to be killable — which is precisely what legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia does — it becomes all too easy to conclude, as Belgians and Netherlanders have, that since these patients want to die we might as well benefit societally from their deaths.
People react with horror at whispers of Chinese organ-harvesting, where dissidents are consigned to death row in order for their organs to be harvested for the lucrative transplant market. Yet the Chinese organ factories are simply a black mirror of “progressive” nations.
…patients with mental illnesses and other diseases are admitted to hospitals, killed by lethal injection, and then wheeled immediately into a surgical suite for organ harvesting…
In the three years since lethal injection euthanasia became legal in Canada, at least thirty people were organ harvested after being euthanized. That number may soon increase dramatically as the Canadian medical establishment has come out solidly in favor of letting people who die by euthanasia to also become organ donors.
A major ethics “Guidance” was just published in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association that establishes euthanasia kill-and-harvest (my blunt term) protocols. It makes for a chilling read.
Of course, advocates of these practices try to disguise their agenda, not just with obfuscating euphemisms, but by paying lip service to “safeguards”. Yet as we have seen time and again, these “safeguards” are quickly eroded. The goalposts inevitably move. What starts as “ending painful terminal conditions” becomes “mental suffering” and finally “on request”. “Adults only” quickly devolves to children (at the same time as some “liberal” jurisdictions start sliding the scale from the other end, allowing for “post-birth abortions”).
Yet, despite all the high-falutin’ talk of “compassion” and “easing suffering”, the slippery slope is invariably fixated on a single goal: death.
I scoured the document, and do you know what I didn’t find? Any requirement that patients who ask for euthanasia receive suicide prevention or treatment to help them overcome the desire to die. In other words, the Guidance places “patient autonomy” above the value of the patient’s life — Hippocratic Oath, be damned — even though some of these patients could later change their minds about wanting to die if they received professional mental health support.
The slope quickly slips into very, very dark territory indeed.
Let’s follow the logic: If we accept the killing of patients who want to die, and if we accept allowing such patients to consent to organ procurement after their death, why not just skip the euthanasia/suicide part and go directly to procuring a living patient’s organs? After all, live organ harvesting would provide better and more viable organs, and also, result in the desired death…articles advocating euthanasia by organ harvesting have been published in some of the world’s most respected medical and bioethics journals…
Thus, the organ procurement surgeon would be transformed from exclusively a protector of life into a killer who causes death by removing vital organs.
spectator
I was vaguely nauseated when Pope John Paul II introduced the competing notions of a “culture of life” versus a “culture of death”. But, with hindsight, it’s hard to see where JPII was wrong. More and more, our culture seems fixated on the idea that death is a quick and easy solution to many difficult problems.
We’ve been there before, of course. In the early 20th century, “progressives” like Shaw, Wells and Sanger were convinced that the only way to improve society was to simply remove its “useless, infirm and unfit” by painless death. Remember how that ended.
