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For Euthanasia Fanatics, It’s Never Enough

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There is an insatiable logic to the euthanasia movement. Once becoming dead is transformed into a fundamental civil right, there is almost no limit to the killing/suicide license thereby created.

Case in point. The Voluntary Euthanasia Society in the Netherlands believes the wide-open killing license granted doctors — its scope extending to the mentally ill, the elderly tired of life, the disabled, the grieving, the chronically ill, the terminally ill — is just not enough.

Now, they want suicide pills made available to the elderly. From the DutchNews.nl story:

The Dutch voluntary euthanasia society is relaunching its campaign to have a pill made available to elderly people who wish to end their lives, the NRC says on Friday. The idea for such a pill was first launched at the beginning of the 1990s by senior judge and euthanasia campaigner Huib Drion and became known as ‘Drion’s pill’.

He said the pill should be issued free of charge to everyone over the age of 70 but his initiative floundered on medical, ethical and legal grounds. Now the NVVE is having a new attempt and this time says the pills should only be issued by pharmacists or family doctors. ‘This is important to make sure the drugs cannot be used for suicide, abuse or murder,’ the organisation said.

“The drugs cannot be used for suicide.” What? That’s their purpose!

It is amazing how death-obsessed these people are. Doctors are already permitted to teach their patients how to commit suicide if they don’t qualify legally for euthanasia (a shrinking list). But even that is not enough.

When euthanasia began in the Netherlands, we who said it would lead to killing the mentally ill and conjoined medicalized killing with organ harvesting were called alarmist. Yet all that came to pass. I have little doubt that at some point, this will too.

Image credit: Takaian at English Wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Cross-posted at Human Exceptionalism.

Wesley J. Smith

Chair and Senior Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism
Wesley J. Smith is Chair and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia. Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement.

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