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.

Breaking News

Prop 8 is overturned by Vaughn Walker, openly gay, chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco

"This just in: San Francisco federal judge Vaughn Walker has shot down California’s Proposition 8, the initiative passed by voters in 2008 that banned same-sex marriage. A handful of news organizations reported the news, including CNN and Dow Jones.

Judge Walker said Proposition 8 violated the federal constitutional rights of gays and lesbians to marry the partners of their choice. Click here for the opinion.

'Plaintiffs challenge Proposition 8 under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment,' the judge wrote. 'Each challenge is independently meritorious, as Proposition 8 both unconstitutionally burdens the exercise of the fundamental right to marry and creates an irrational classification on the basis of sexual orientation.'

Walker’s ruling is expected to be appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and then up to the U.S. Supreme Court."
Wall Street Journal/Law Blog

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/08/04/breaking-news-sf-judge-shoots-down-proposition-8/

Canada

After the "landmark" change in the definition of marriage, Parliamentarian Svend Robinson was asked if he would now marry his partner Max.

Svend answered: "It's been an incredible time for those of us who have struggled for full recognition of gay and lesbian couples' equality rights. Yet I'm still unsure if Max and I will marry anytime soon. After nine years in a committed, loving relationship, how would the state's imprimatur change anything?"(Globe and Mail, June 24, 2003)

Even to Robinson, marriage in Canada has now lost it's meaning.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/18/world/main559147.shtml

Holland

How has gay marriage fared in Holland?

To a Dutch observer of American society and politics, it all looked just a little too familiar. The long lines in front of the Massachusetts registry offices, the glare of the media spotlights, gay-marriage proponents crowing about a "historic breakthrough." The scenes were virtually identical to those in Amsterdam three years ago, when amid much fanfare, the world's first legal gay-marriage ceremonies were conducted by the city's mayor. If the U.S. continues to follow the Dutch script, the next few months will see more jubilant headlines about the overwhelming demand for marriage licenses among homosexuals, a few more model gay couples getting married, and then...silence. With its aim achieved and the campaign over, gay-rights activists will simply drop the issue of marriage altogether and move on.

And what, exactly, will they have accomplished? The first legal gay wedding ceremonies in the Netherlands took place on April 1, 2001. By November 2002, however, gay-marriage enthusiasts were forced to admit that interest in this new institution was fading. Since April 2001, each quarter has brought a further decline in the number of gay marriages, falling from 2,500 in 2001 to less than 1,500 last year. As of April 2004, only 5,916 of Holland's roughly 55,000 gay couples had tied the knot. The floodgates had been forced open by gay-marriage activists, but through them came just a trickle of mainly lesbian couples (lesbians make up only 20 percent of the homosexual community in the Netherlands, but they now make up more than half of all married homosexual couples).

Joshua Livestro
National Review

http://old.nationalreview.com/comment/livestro200406290924.asp

Pitching Euthanasia

The vulgarization of the entertainment industry is a sign of the increasing barbarism of culture. In Australia, there is a television show, The Gruen Transfer: the Pitch, that (in the words of the host, Wil Anderson, “challenges two advertising agencies to sell us something that logic says, we’d never buy.”

On one recent show, Mr. Anderson challenged the two ad agencies, “as our nation grays and our superannuation budget goes into the red,” to sell compulsory euthanasia for those over 80 years old.

The audience titters nervously. The two ad men mention from rival agencies note their discomfort. And then they show the two videos, one of an old man unhooking himself from tubes in a hospital as he speaks of the benefits of making room for new babies, and the other of the benefits of being able to schedule your goodbye to ailing grandparents or parents.

All in fun? Not in the least, as our main article makes clear. Final Exit Network is quite happy to advertise the convenience of death. But their stark and uninviting billboard is nothing compared to what the two ad agencies in The Pitch were able to conjure up. How long do you think it will take before the Final Exit Network hires an enterprising ad agency to sell death with a little more flair and ingenuity?

The premise of vulgar episode of The Pitch was that pitching euthanasia was somehow both challenging and amusing because it was something that “logic says, we’d never buy.” Alas, would that it were true. The culture of death has been selling euthanasia for a long time. They’re just looking for a better ad man.

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/gruentransfer/thepitch.htm

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