August 5, 2010

The advocacy billboards appeared without warning in San Francisco and New Jersey: "My Life. My Death. My Choice." Paid for by the Final Exit Network (FEN), the promotional signs received widespread media coverage as a new wrinkle in the ongoing national campaign to legalize assisted suicide.

But there is much more to this story than controversial messaging on billboard. FEN doesn't just advocate assisted suicide: Its "counselors" make deadly house calls. Indeed, FEN members have been indicted in Georgia—including Ted Goodwin, its former head— and in Arizona for alleged assisted suicide activities. So far, two FEN members have pleaded guilty (in the Arizona case involving the suicide of a mentally ill woman).

FEN-style moral outlawry is nothing new, of course. In the 1990s, Jack Kevorkian plowed this particular field until convicted of second degree murder. (Proving that crime pays: Kevorkian has retired from his deadly avocation and receives $50,000 per speech, as he basks in the warm light of a sympathetic biopic starring AL Pacino. Kevorkian's Australian counterpart, physician Philip Nitschke, still travels the world teaching people how-to-commit suicide as he attempts to tout a suicide concoction called "the peaceful pill," which he opined in a National Review Online interview, should be made available to anyone who wants to die, including "troubled teens."

As outrageous as the FEN, Kevorkian, and Nitschke are, they do not pose the primary threat.  In the last ten years, a new class of advocates has emerged pursuing a “professional” approach to assisted suicide promotion. Epitomized by the euphemistically named Compassion and Choices and funded in the millions annually by the likes of George Soros, well off and well tailored elites promote a so-called “medical model” for legalized “aid in dying” in meetings with medical and legal associations, in articles published in professional journals, and ubiquitously to the media.  To assuage fears of abuse, unlike the moral outlaws, assisted suicide professionals assure a wary public that doctor facilitated suicide will be restricted to the terminally ill for whom nothing else can be done to alleviate suffering—a false premise designed to play into people’s worst fears about the dying process.

Yet, despite the clear differences in political tactics, both the moral outlaws and professional advocates pose a similar danger to the weak and vulnerable. Indeed, once society accepts the fundamental ideological premise that killing is a legitimate method of eliminating human suffering, the death remedy continually expands to ever growing categories of despairing people.  After all, if the time, manner, and place of “my death” is merely a matter of “my choice,” simple logic dictates that “the right to die” will expand beyond the terminally ill—and as we shall see, even beyond “choice.”

A brief review of the jurisdictions where euthanasia and assisted suicide are allowed illustrate the truth of the above assertion. Consider:

The Netherlands: The Netherlands has allowed euthanasia and assisted suicide by doctors since 1973, formally legalizing mercy killing by doctors in 2002. In that time, despite the supposed guidelines to protect against abuse, Dutch doctors have euthanized the terminally ill who ask for it, the chronically ill who ask for it, people with disabilities who ask for it, and the deeply depressed who ask for it—the latter explicitly approved by the Dutch Supreme Court in a case involving the assisted suicide by a psychiatrist of a mother who wanted to die out of grief for her two dead children. Illustrating how profoundly accepting euthanasia consciousness alters human society, this year more than 100,000 Dutch citizens signed petitions requiring the Parliament to debate whether to permit the healthy elderly (age 70 or older) to receive euthanasia if they are "tired of life."

But it gets worse: According to several Dutch government and other studies, death doctors also commit some 800-900 non-voluntary euthanasia killings—called "termination without request or consent" in Dutch euthanasia parlance—as well as the infanticide of babies born with disabling or terminal conditions.

Even though non-voluntary euthanasia and infanticide remain murder under Dutch law, it is rarely prosecuted, and even when it is, doctors face no meaningful punishment.

• Belgium: Belgium legalized euthanasia in 2002, and fell off the same moral cliff as the Netherlands—only more quickly. Despite the legal requirement that all euthanasia deaths be asked for by the patient, Belgian doctors—and nurses—also commit non-voluntary euthanasia. For example, a survey of Belgian nurses published by the Canadian Medical Association Journal, found that of 248 euthanasia deaths, 120—nearly 50%--were administered without request, and moreover, that many deaths were facilitated by nurses. Perhaps even more frighteningly, voluntary euthanasia has been coupled with organ procurement—potentially giving the despairing a reason to end their own lives as a way of serving others, while offering society a utilitarian stake in their deaths.
• Switzerland: A very liberal Swiss assisted suicide law has led to a growing international industry in "suicide tourism" that has taken the lives of hundreds of sick and despairing people—including many people who were not terminally ill. Meanwhile, Ludwig Minelli—owner of the suicide clinic Dignitas, was reported by UK media to have become a millionaire from his suicide business, which caters to foreigners. Not coincidentally, the Swiss Supreme Court created a constitutional right to assisted suicide for the mentally ill.
• Oregon: When faced with these facts—and many other horror stories too numerous to recount here—assisted suicide advocates point to Oregon to show that medicalized killing can be practiced in a restricted manner. But Oregon has also had its share of abuses. In 2008, for example, Randy Stroup and Barbara Wagner—both on Oregon's rationed Medicaid program—were prescribed chemotherapy to extend their lives when their terminal cancer recurred. When they asked for Medicaid to pay their medical bills, it refused but sent a letter offering to pay for their assisted suicides. Meanwhile, an article published in the Michigan Law Review by Dr. Kathleen Foley—one of America's most respected palliative care physicians—and psychiatrist Herbert Hendin—one of the United States' most notable experts on suicide prevention—revealed that Oregon's protective guidelines "are being circumvented" routinely by doctors because the state's bureaucrats too often act "as defenders of the law rather than protectors of the welfare of terminally ill patients."

All of this—and much, much more that could be written—demonstrates vividly that the assisted suicide movement is a clear and present danger to the lives of the weak, vulnerable, and despairing. Indeed, lurking beneath the loud assertions of "My life, my death, my choice," lurks an ideology that would lead us toward for-profit suicide clinics—already proposed in Oregon —and a virtual death on demand social ethic. That is the ugly truth that simplistic billboard sloganeering just can't hide.

Response to: Hate Filled Hypocrites

I was amused by this week's article, particularly the idea the Evangelical Christianity would fit any definition of politically neutral. The death of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson's health problems and James Dobson support of his son's ministry take the nuttiest actors off the stage, but Mike Huckabee helped to engineer Falwell's success and there are no shortage or right-wing zealots in American pulpits. The Evangelical Church fills the ranks of the TEA Party and makes up the listener base of hate-spewing talk radio hosts like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. What is neutral about that? I was deployed to Iraq last year with an Army aviation unit. One large group of soldiers among the thousands on our base was the refugees from Youth Group. I attended Chapel with other older guys. No young soldiers in chapel services, it was the over-30 crowd, which is very old in the Army. These young men and women reject the Church, but remain right wing in their politics. I had a chance to talk to many of these young soldiers. They knew I was a believer, I formed a CS Lewis book group in Iraq. They also knew from discussion in the mess hall that I vote democrat and did not believe science could be made up in Kentucky. I was a curiosity for them. These young soldiers still believe in God, but want no part of what they perceive as a brainwash culture. The Church triumphs because it is the body of our living Savior, not because the American Church model of Attendance, Building and Contributions is somehow ordained in Heaven. If these soldiers return to faith, it will be because the Church they attend will give them a mission more compelling than the one we had in Iraq. - N.G.