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Because There Can Never Be Enough Suicide

Wesley J. Smith

suicide

In the Netherlands, there can never be enough suicide and euthanasia. Think about it.

Terminally ill people can be terminated by doctors. Chronically ill people can be terminated by doctors.

Elderly people with normal physical aging, can be terminated by doctors. There have even been joint euthanasia killings of elderly couples who fear the future grief of widowhood.

The mentally ill are terminated by doctors and their bodies moved to a surgical suite for organ harvesting.

Doctors are also permitted by an ethics opinion of the Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) to teach patients how to commit suicide if they don’t qualify legally — an ever-shrinking cadre — for euthanasia.

And now, a suicide co-op (!) will provide information for obtaining a lethal home-brewed poison to self-terminate. From the Dutch News story:

Membership of a group campaigning for the right of people to end their own lives at the time of their choosing has doubled following a television programme about its ‘discovery’ of a deadly powder which is legally available.

The Last Will cooperative had 3,323 members before the Nieuwsuur broadcast but membership has now rocketed to 6,800, chairman Jos van Wijk told local paper De Stentor. The cooperative is campaigning for the right of its members to obtain and use a drug to end their lives at the moment they see fit.

New members have to wait six months before they are given information about the powder, which is a widely available preservative.

The only way anyone in the Netherlands will care about the resulting deaths is if these nihilists tested the substance on dogs.

And get this:

Despite the surge in membership, the cooperative has come under fire for allowing people as young as 18 to join and for breaking the law which bans people from helping others to commit suicide.

Stop! Please. The bitter laughter hurts my ribs.

It took decades for the Dutch to become such a vivid culture of death. The same process will occur here too if we allow the assisted suicide virus to spread nationally.

Photo credit: Ben Mills (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Cross-posted at The Corner.

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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agingassisted suicideculture of deathDe StentordoctorsDutch Medical AssociationDutch NewselderlyeuthanasiaJos van Wijkmentally illNetherlandspowdersuicidesuicide co-opterminally ill