Euthanasia advocates tout medicalized killing as being about autonomy.
But it eventually becomes about making sure certain categories of people become dead. Thus, in the Netherlands, some patients have been euthanized who have never asked for it, a killing procedure known as “termination without request or consent.”
Here’s another case in point. A woman signed an advance directive to be killed “at the right time” due to Alzheimer’s. But when the decision to kill her was made, she fought the lethal jab, so the death doctor had the family hold the struggling woman down so she could finish the homicide.
Despite this blatant imposing of death, the doctor was cleared of wrongdoing by euthanasia authorities. From The Telegraph story:
A Dutch woman doctor who asked an elderly patient’s family to hold her down while she administered a fatal drug dose has been cleared under Holland’s euthanasia laws.
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Mailonline reported that the patient fought desperately in an attempt not to be killed.
Jacob Kohnstamm, chairman of the Regional Review Committee, which considered the case, said: “I am convinced that the doctor acted in good faith, and we would like to see more clarity on how such cases are handled in the future.”
Other “such cases?” For the Dutch, “good faith” justifies all manner of evil.
Here are the lessons we should learn from this awful episode: Permitting killing as an answer to human suffering changes a culture radically over time. It diminishes the perceived inherent value of human life. Eventually, horrific acts become justified as “compassion.”
LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D., is a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture and a bioethics attorney who blogs at Human Exeptionalism.
