LifeNews.com Note: Award winning author Wesley J. Smith is special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. His current book is Consumer’s Guide to a Brave New World.

I have become so sick and tired of the baloney that swirls around assisted suicide advocacy like gruel in a blender.

Assisted suicide is not really about the rare case when nothing else can be done to alleviate suffering--which has not been the case yet in any legalized jurisdiction from the Netherlands, to Switzerland, to Oregon. Rather, it is about establishing the right to what in essence would be death on demand.

This is clearly stated in a speech given by Ludwig Minelli, the suicide zealot who heads Dignitas.

Writing about the Swiss Supreme Court ruling granting a right to assisted suicide for the mentally ill -- which I wrote about here -- Minelli claims that suicide and assisted suicide both are human rights. In other words, the so-called limitations that would limit this killing to the terminally or hopelessly ill are bogus.

From his speech (no link):

But this so-called right is even more that an individual right to do with one's own body what one will--it includes the right to help from others to make sure one gets dead:

It is also worth noting that the speech was given to Dutch euthanasia advocates who already live in the most euthanasia friendly country in the world--and yet it is still not enough. That is because it never will be enough.

So this is the future that assisted suicide/euthanasia advocates either explicitly seek, or will bring about whether or not that is there intention since the logic here is impeccable.

The answer, of course, is that there is no "right" to suicide, that societies have the duty to protect all people's lives--even from self destruction--and that, as Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life is inalienable.

So too with selling oneself into slavery and declaring a right to burn your arms with cigarettes--both "choices" that should also be prohibited. Such actions not only harm the individual, but are profoundly subversive of decency and equal regard for the lives of all people in society.

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