Now, It’s Equal Rights To Suicide Pills
Just four years after Oregon voters narrowly approved physician-assisted suicide, “right-to-die” advocates are now telling taxpayers they have an obligation to subsidize poor people who wish to end their lives.
The Oregon Health Services Commission voted 10-1 to authorize delivery of lethal prescription drugs for the 340,000 low-income residents insured under the state’s Medicaid program. Euthanasia opponents say proponents never mentioned suicide subsidies when they promoted the law. They should not have been surprised. Once a right is created, it isn’t long before anyone who cannot afford to exercise that right is regarded as a victim of discrimination and petitioners demand that tax dollars be used to bring that person up to the level of the “rich” who can afford to kill themselves.
Whatever happened to the old-fashioned ways of suicide, such as inhaling carbon monoxide, jumping off a bridge, ingesting poison or a shot to the head - all relatively inexpensive means of ending a life without getting government involved? But suicide isn’t the issue. Those who would further dehumanize us must wipe away every vestige of what it means to be unique among living things. They began with abortion. They continue with infanticide (partial-birth abortion), and now they wish to complete their task with euthanasia.
We are truly frogs in a kettle. The heat is being turned up very slowly and we don’t realize that we are boiling to death. The language is being rewritten to lull us into complacency. The rush to kiss the death angel began with “living wills.” When attempts were made to allow doctors to kill “terminal” patients, they failed because the public found that too repugnant.
The approach was switched to “assisted suicide” because this strategy would focus attention on the suffering patient and make the doctor a compassionate dispenser of help and comfort. But a 21-year-old paralyzed man who last week won release from a Michigan hospital so he could die at the hands of Dr. Jack Kevorkian does not fit the stereotypical elderly patient on life support. Might a pro-life environment have given Roosevelt Dawson the will to live?
The Supreme Court, which has said the unborn have no right to live, rejected the idea that people have a right to die. Give it time. Euthanasia forces saw Oregon as the wedge state and, after some reversals, won the battle there.
Dr. J.C. Willke’s new book, “Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: Past and Present,” makes the point that most people continue to regard euthanasia as something that is made available only to the terminal elderly to relieve unbearable suffering. That is no more true than the notion that the Supreme Court allows abortion only during the first three months of pregnancy.
Willke, former president of National Right to Life, writes, “Today, we, the medical profession, do not let people die a natural death. Now, rather than over-treatment, we are being accused of under-treatment. With managed care coming upon us in an almost suffocating fashion, in some areas, over-treatment is but history, and my colleagues, in many cases, can only hope they will be allowed to give their patients adequate treatment.” Thus, the door to euthanasia is opened in order to relieve suffering, help families and save money. What could be more noble?
A society that treats “burdens” as something to be rid of rather than opportunities to deepen the human experience will quickly jettison “inconvenient” life if it robs us of our precious time or drains our inheritance. As we properly appeal for racial justice, we simultaneously promote injustice and lose our right to appeal to any standard outside ourselves by redefining what life is, when it begins and ends, and who decides.
Great horrors do not occur overnight, nor do they develop in a vacuum. They begin with small compromises, unnoticed by most people. They advance on a wave of apathy, subtle appeals to selfishness and a loss of God-consciousness.
When man places himself in the supreme position of deciding right from wrong, it is a very short step toward deciding such things for others and forcing even people who don’t agree to subsidize these practices with their tax dollars.
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