When the powerful couch their ideological agenda in cutesy euphemisms, it’s because they know telling the unvarnished truth will expose just how dangerous and ugly their agenda really is. Thus, communist China speaks of ‘stability maintenance’, when they mean ‘crushing dissent’. Governments everywhere don’t raise taxes or cut budgets: it’s all ‘revenue enhancement’ and ‘efficiency savings’. Medicos report a ‘negative patient care outcome’ when they don’t want to come right out and say they killed their patient.
And the politicians, health bureaucrats and legacy media shills will never, ever tell the truth about medicalised suicide. As I’ve written before, we’re supposed to regard suicide with such horror that the legacy media are all-but forbidden from even reporting it as such. Put a white coat over suicide, though, and it’s supposed to be the moral pinnacle of modern medicine.
Let us observe the pious hand-wringing in Canberra, where senators recently had the opportunity to afford aged-care facilities a modest exemption from participating in the culture of state-sanctioned exit packages. Naturally, the uniparty grandees, joined by a handful of ‘moderate’ Liberals who wouldn’t know a traditional conservative principle if it bit them on the shins, swiftly voted down One Nation’s common-sense protection.
Labor and Coalition senators have split on a proposal to restrict access to voluntary assisted dying in aged care homes, after being granted a conscience vote on the issue.
An amendment moved to aged care laws by One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts on Tuesday proposed granting aged care providers the right to refuse to allow a voluntary assisted dying process for a resident in their care.
So, it’s all go if you want to off grandma! Doubleplusgood, comrades!
The numbers, released in recent transparency reports, reveal a grim trajectory. More than 7,200 souls have checked out via medicalised suicide since its introduction, with numbers compounding annually at a rate that would make a Silicon Valley startup blush. Queensland and New South Wales are rapidly catching up to Victoria’s pioneering efforts, proving that once you cross the Rubicon of state-administered death, the market for the grim reaper expands briskly.
That’s still not enough to satisfy the ghouls of the death cult, though.
VAD advocate Go Gentle’s [pass me the barf bag] chief executive, Linda Swan, said […] “We think growth in VAD will head towards a plateau of about five per cent of deaths, which is where it is in other countries in Europe and North America, although it will be probably five or so years before we get there.”
North America? Does she mean Canada? Canada, where medicalised suicide is now a top-five cause of death? Even more shockingly, up to three-quarters of deaths of elderly Canucks came at the end of a doctor’s needle.
Now they want to bring in dial-a-death. Literally.
One change that could make a difference would be for the federal government to allow Telehealth to be used in the VAD assessment process, something currently not allowed under the Commonwealth Criminal Code.
Why don’t they just go the whole hog and install Futurama-style suicide booths on street corners?
When the initial legislation was forced through the Victorian parliament years ago, the architects swore blind that rigid, unshakeable safeguards would prevent any untoward slide into wholesale disposal of the inconvenient. Yet, as the Australian Medical Association pointed out, the sheer stringency of the proposed safeguards was an admission of the inherent danger of the enterprise itself. If a legislative step requires a fortress of red tape to keep it from descending into catastrophe, systematically dismantling that red tape is sheer lunacy. And yet, that is precisely what is occurring. Victoria is currently moving to relax its prognosis requirements and water down the so-called gag clauses, aligning itself with more permissive jurisdictions.
The slippery slope critics, of course, were dismissed as alarmist reactionaries peddling old-fashioned moral panics. Yet here we are. Every single slippery slope prediction is being methodically ticked off the checklist with bureaucratic precision.
How much further down this precipice are we prepared to tumble before we look in the mirror? Canada, that utopian laboratory of progressive compassion, is our inevitable destination. There, we read horrifying accounts of disabled citizens being steered toward an early grave because securing wheelchair access or housing assistance proves too expensive for the state accountants. And the bleeding-heart vanguard is already eyeing off ‘mature minors’, opening the door to children opting out of life without so much as a polite nod to parental consent or knowledge.
Are we genuinely expected to believe that Australia will remain miraculously immune to these same systemic pressures? Once the taboo against state-assisted self-destruction is broken, life ceases to be an intrinsic good protected by law and instead becomes a balance sheet item, subject to cost-benefit analysis by overburdened relatives and cost-cutting bureaucrats.
We were promised a compassionate safety valve for the terminally afflicted. Instead, we have unlocked a suicide booth. Until our political class summons the moral courage to halt this descent, we shall continue sliding down the greasy pole of utilitarian ethics, cheering on our own institutional unravelling with a tidy white coat and a bureaucratic smile.
