Let’s Bump Off the Useless

It’s not something the pro-death lobby like to acknowledge, but the doctors’ representative group is firmly against so-called ‘Voluntary Assisted Dying’. The Australian Medical Association has consistently lodged submissions against medical suicide legislations as they’ve risen in each state.

“The AMA does not support the introduction of Physician-Assisted Suicide,” their position statement reads, showing admirable clarity of language. The very fact, after all, that advocates of medical suicide so routinely resort to circumlocutory euphemisms like ‘VAD’ suggests how much they know their obsession with killing people really is.

Similarly, the World Medical Association states that it is firmly opposed to Physician-Assisted Suicide […]

Doctors should not be involved in interventions that have as their primary intention the ending of a person’s life.

‘Ah, but the safeguards!’ advocates witter. As the AMA submission to Victoria’s medical suicide legislation noted, the very fact that the laws have to be ring-fenced in so many safeguards and protocols shows just how dangerous it really is.

Especially when, the instant the laws are passed, pressure is applied by the pro-death mob to water the safeguards down.

In a classic motte-and-bailey gambit, pro-death advocates invariably trot out the sob stories about patients ‘ending their last days in intolerable pain’. In reality, these manipulative tear-jerking stories are not unlike pro-abortion advocates and their claims of ‘pregnancies from rape and incest’. As the data shows, those in fact account for a tiny minority of abortions.

Similarly, pro-death lobbyists almost always successfully see to it that ‘imminent death and intolerable pain’ gives way to ‘just tired of living’. The end game – rapidly being achieved in places like Belgium and the Netherlands – is ‘on demand, at any age’.

Worse, in Canada, horrific stories are emerging of people being coerced to kill themselves and save everyone a lot of time and money. The disabled and the mentally ill are particular targets of this sort of horrific coercion. Coercion which, witnesses at Britain’s typically euphemistic ‘Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) bill’ are testifying, will be very hard to detect.

During the session, [Disability Rights (DR UK)] and other disabled witnesses well and truly exposed the gargantuan glaring cracks at the heart of the bill.

Disabled lecturer in social policy and disability studies at the University of Leeds, Dr Miro Griffiths […] told the committee that the principles in the bill purportedly covering coercion are:

incredibly weak in terms of the scrutinising and also the process of how you judge whether coercion has taken place.

Founder of eating disorder organisation Eat Breathe Thrive Chelsea Roff also attended the session. Roff and others testified that, whatever the AMA’s and other bodies’ official stance, individual physicians can and often do have quite contrary attitudes.

Roff separately put forward evidence of coercion in the context of her research on eating disorders and assisted deaths. She explained to the committee how:

Sometimes it [coercion] comes tragically from the clinicians themselves. We saw 95 per cent of clinicians tell the patient and their family that they had an incurable, irremediable illness with a six month of less prognosis…

That has an influence on someone. That does not cohere with the evidence on eating disorder recovery […]

On her X, Roff linked to some of these cases after the session.

Head of policy for Disability Rights UK, Fazilet Hadi, testified that:

We’ve [DR UK] had disabled people who’ve actually had it suggested to them or their families that their lives are expendable – when actually those people have got a lot of years to give […]

When you acquire disability – which most people do, most people aren’t born with one, it is absolutely frightening […] And if doctors aren’t on our side – because actually they’re thinking should we mention the fact they could have an assisted death. I think that poses a big cultural issue for the NHS, but also for us having confidence in the NHS.

Chelsea Roff highlighted that:

Laws in other countries have expanded through clinical interpretation, not just legislative amendments – there are clinicians, a very small minority, that disagree and have characterised anorexia, by name, as a terminal illness. But they have also said that eating disorders qualify because of the physical manifestation of the disorder […]

Overall though, disabled witnesses at the session made clear that the bill does pose significant risks to disabled people. Contrary to Leadbeater and co’s repeated assertion that it has the strongest safeguards in the world, they showed that these are anything but.

Oh, stop whining and being such a burden. All you ever think about is yourselves…