Our wise ideologues are never short on assurances that every last one of their society-changing initiatives are .jpg)
brimming with “guarantees” and “safeguards.”
The obvious one is abortion. In 1996, Bill Clinton said “abortion should not only be safe and legal, it should be rare.” In New York in 2012, more African-American babies were aborted than were born. Ah – the Ratchet Effect upon morality.
Euthanasia is a more recent controversy. Under the guise of individual choice for the sick, and compassion from the healthy, lobbyists have fought hard to get euthanasia on the statute books. Again, “guarantees,” “safeguards,” “safe,” “rare” – we’ve heard these promises before.
In February, the Belgian parliament voted to allow euthanasia for children [1] without any age limit. Yes, you read that correctly: any age.
Last week, Bloomberg [2] published a particularly poignant piece on various medical professionals’ perspectives, as they digest this new law. The article quotes Arthur Caplan, who heads the division of medical ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center: “When you’re under 16, most parents don’t let children decide what to watch on television.”
Indeed, in a world where the stigma has well and truly been lifted from suicide, does the rise of completed and attempted suicide, and parasuicidal behaviour, in teens not suggest that perhaps they are not best placed to make life-or-death decisions? Now, what about a six year old? Try discussing mortality with a Senior Infant.
And what will this new law do to patient-doctor relationships? To duty-of-care? To health-care rationing bureaucrats’ approach to patients? To our concept of “insufferable pain” and “a life worth living”? To the timelines proffered by cancer experts for life expectancy? Ah, I’m sure our wise ideologues have those all thought through.
And it’s indeed only 12 years since the wise Belgians legalised euthanasia for adults.
Thought experiment: back in say 2001, during the debates for that particular law, how would “Yes” campaigners have responded to an argument that that the law would eventually cover children of any age. After much laughter and derision, the word “scaremongering” would have been used a lot. Wise minds, you see.
Whether through genuine – albeit ill-conceived – compassion, or more disturbing origins [3], advocates of euthanasia are unravelling the fabric of what it is to be human. Say what you will about the religious overtones in describing the “sanctity of life,” and life being a “gift from God.” But without such backbone, seeing humans in a functional-materialistic light is inevitable. The weak beware: the wise Nietzscheans are looming.