Merchants of death are excitedly pushing to add more cars to their anti-Personhood train that takes the elderly and infirm to the tragedy of ending their own lives.
Advocates of enabling people to kill themselves are hoping Massachusetts will open the floodgates for enacting more physician assisted death laws across the country.
“They [opponents] know that if death with dignity passes in Massachusetts, other states will quickly follow their leadership,” according to Peg Sandeen, Chief Executive Officer of Death with Dignity.
The organization, which is strongly lobbying the barbaric proposal, thinks it would be a great victory because the state is 40% Catholic.
Physician assisted death is available in 10 states and the District of Columbia. The practice is banned in Georgia.
A Flurry of Activity
There are currently 12 states, including Massachusetts, that are considering physician assisted death laws. The others are: Delaware, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Indiana, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Virginia, Utah, and Arizona.
In a thirteenth (Wisconsin), a similar bill failed to pass before the legislature adjourned. Another physician assisted death law was also defeated in Connecticut.
Three states—Hawaii, Vermont, and Washington—are considering expanding their current assisted death laws by changing or eliminating safeguards to make it easier and faster for people to end their lives.
These stepped up efforts reflect our godless culture that is increasingly willing to consider some people less worthy of life, especially those with mental deficiencies.
This point is raised in a book by Charles Camosy, a bioethicist and theologian at Fordham University. Entitled Losing our Dignity: How Secularized Medicine is Undermining Fundamental Human Equality, the book asserts that the lives of millions of people with dementia are at risk.
His central thesis is that as medicine became secularized, it rejected the fact that humans are worthy of respect and protection because we are created in the image of God. Instead, now we’re only valued if we’re rational, self-aware, autonomous, and productive.
Headed Down the Wrong Path
Camosy argues that if we remain on the current path, we will start euthanizing people with later-stage dementia.
It’s important to note the difference between physician assisted death and euthanasia. With physician assisted death, a physician prescribes lethal pills that the person is supposed to self-administer. Euthanasia, on the other hand, requires the physician to directly administer a lethal injection, sometimes without permission and sometimes even against the person’s will.
That reality was revealed in the Netherlands where euthanasia is legal. In 2019, a doctor was acquitted of criminal charges for euthanizing an elderly woman against her will.
While she originally requested to be euthanized if her dementia worsened, she later changed her mind. However, her family insisted that her first request be honored and actually held her down in order to sedate her before a physician administered the lethal injection.
Similar concerns about promoting death for the elderly and infirm were raised in a 2019 article in USA Today that proclaimed, “Doctors should heal patients, not kill them. Assisted suicide makes us agents of death.”
Written by Lydia Dugdale, an internal medicine physician and medical ethicist at Columbia University, the article states, “It’s not hard to see how the availability of physician-assisted death will pressure and coerce the sick, the disabled and the elderly to end their lives when they become too inconvenient for their loved ones and too costly for society.”
Dr. Dugdale added, “By normalizing the option of death for patients whose lives [incorrectly] prove burdensome, patients will feel guilty for not hastening their deaths—something I’ve witnessed in my own medical practice.”
Eliminating the Less Worthy
In addition, she said, “If we’re tempted to think physician-assisted suicide is about choice—empowering us to die on our own terms—we should think again. The legalization of the practice has prompted a broad consideration of whose lives are worth maintaining.”
She noted that, “Insurance companies, for example are increasingly willing to cover the cost of cheaper death—including drugs over more expensive life-saving treatments…”
Camosy observes that what many dementia patients in this country already experience is a form of unofficial euthanasia. “Isolated from the rest of us and kept ‘docile’ with various drugs in what are essentially warehouses where they wait to die alone,” he writes.
The future looks even darker and more sinister. Two prominent bioethicists have proposed creating a time-delayed, subdermal implant that would automatically release a lethal drug at a predetermined time, or after some event has occurred.
Called an “advance directive implant” (ADI), such a device would add further fuel to the disgusting idea that dementia patients’ lives are not worth living.
All of this should not be. It’s outrageous. We are not animals, and we should not be treated like one, to be put down if we can’t play fetch anymore.
Because we’re created in the image of God, human life has an inherently sacred attribute and dignity that must be protected and respected at all times. There is no dignity in taking your own life or having someone else do it.
As a society, we should advocate for our loved ones who think they have no other option other than to end their lives by requesting medical and emotional support and treatment that affirms their true dignity and worth.
This includes affirming, helping and spending time with elderly people in our lives and letting them know that we love them and enjoy spending time with them.
Georgia Right to Life has embraced that fundamental truth for 50 years. We will continue the fight to protect all innocent human life with your prayers and financial support. Please visit the GRTL website to give, and God bless you.
Sources: cruxnow.com; gotquestions.org; cbhd.org; bioedge.org; beingpatient.com; usatoday.com; nationalreview.com; gazettenet.com.
By Wayne DuBois
Georgia Right to Life
Media Relations Advisor