Euthanasia advocates begin their advocacy by assuring us suicide will only be permitted for the terminally ill who are suffering great pain. That’s what they say. But it’s not long after suicide is legalized that those same advocates push for expanding suicide to the non-terminally ill, and expand the definition of suffering to include emotional suffering. We’ve seen this kind of thing in Belgium and the Netherlands. In fact, in those two countries we’ve seen euthanasia expand from a voluntary choice, to non-voluntary, and even involuntary.
England is pushing for Euthanasia. Ironically, one of their leading bioethicists is being honest about what circumstances she thinks euthanasia should be legal in before “basic” euthanasia is legalized. During a recent interview for the October 2008 edition of Life & Work-a Church of Scotland publication-Baroness Mary Warnock made the following assertions about the duty to die: “If you’re demented, you’re wasting people’s lives – your family’s lives – and you’re wasting the resources of the National Health Service.” She is very clear that the right and duty to die is not tied to insufferable pain: “I’m absolutely, fully in agreement with the argument that if pain is insufferable, then someone should be given help to die, but I feel there’s a wider argument that if somebody absolutely, desperately wants to die because they’re a burden to their family, or the state, then I think they too should be allowed to die.”[1]
Don’t buy into the “it will only be limited to the terminally ill and suffering” polemic. It’s not true.
HT: Al Mohler
[1]“A Duty to Die?” in Life and Work, October 2008; available from www.churchofscotland.org.uk.
Thinking to Believe 
October 7, 2008 at 10:39 am
An interesting thought hit me as I was reading Ms. Warnock’s comments (maybe I’m just too dumb to have thought of it before). A nationalized health care system is a natural precedent to rationalizing legalized euthanisia and the expansion of it beyond terminally ill patients. With nationalized health care the expense of keeping people alive will be too much of a burden on an economy that is already stretched to its limits.
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October 7, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Paco,
Bingo! That’s why even some liberal groups vehemently oppose euthanasia. It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep someone alive, but only $100 to assist them in their suicide. And given how strapped for cash national healthcare systems usually are (the UK system is a good example of this), what’s in the patient’s best interest takes a back seat to what’s in the system’s best financial interest.
Derek Humphry, the founder of the Hemlock Society, acknowledges as much in his book Freedom to Die: “A rational argument can be made for allowing PAS [physician-assisted suicide] in order to offset the amount society and family spend on the ill, as long as it is the voluntary wish of the mentally competent terminally and incurably ill adult. There will likely come a time when PAS becomes a commonplace occurrence for individuals who want to die and feel it is the right thing to do by their loved ones. There is no contradicting the fact that since the largest medical expenses are incurred in the final days and weeks of life, the hastened demise of people with only a short time left would free resources for others. Hundreds of billions of dollars could benefit those patients who not only can be cured but who want to live.”
Bioethicist Margaret Pabst Battin of the University of Utah argues that in the future we may have a moral obligation to “conserve health care resources by forgoing treatment or directly ending [our] life.”
And you don’t need to be in a nationalized healthcare system for this to happen. It’s happening here in the US. In Oregon, Medicaid denied a man treatment for his prostate cancer, but offered to cover assisted suicide instead. They also denied a woman with lung cancer a drug that would prolong her life, but offered to cover assisted suicide instead. For the stories, see:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,392962,00.html
http://www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/dt.cms.support.viewStory.cls?cid=106873&sid=1&fid=1
Jason
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October 7, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Paco,
What I find even scarier is that high-profile academics and bioethicists admit they do not think euthanasia should be limited to consenting, terminally ill adults. Many argue that we should be able to euthanize certain persons who have not given their consent, such as those in a persistent vegetative state and severely handicapped newborn children. Others argue that euthanasia should be available to the mentally ill, and even teens. It’s scary where this agenda leads. It is a logical slippery slope, and it’s not just theoretical. We have already countries like the Netherlands slide all the way down the slope.
Jason
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October 10, 2013 at 10:55 am
[…] Euthanasia will not stay limited to the suffering, terminally ill […]
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