The September 21 paper, written by doctors at Sick Kids, along with administrators and medical ethicists, was published in the British Medical Journal's J Med Ethics and backed by the University of Toronto's Joint Centre for Bioethics. The paper appeared just three months before the Canadian Council of Academies is due to report to Parliament on the medical consensus of extending voluntary euthanasia to children under 18, psychiatric patients and patients who have expressed a preference for dying before they were rendered incapable by Alzheimer's or some other disease. The assisted murder of people falling in these categories is currently prohibited by Canadian law.
The paper's authors argue there is no meaningful ethical distinction between a patient choosing to refuse burdensome treatment and accepting an inevitable death versus patients who choose to die by chemical injection before the disease brings on death. And since Ontario law does not require parents to be involved in a "capable minor's" decision to refuse further treatment, there is no legal reason to include parents in decisions about "assisted death."
In other words, if the proposal is adopted physicians will be legally able to kill minor children at the child's request without consultation with parents; kill mentally ill people — who lack the capacity for rational thought; and kill people who may or may not one day develop an illness. That ultimately transcends into physicians having the license to kill anyone for any reason. So much for the Hippocratic Oath — first, do no harm.
The abortion crowd and their defenders and proponents justify the murders of the soon-to-be-born humans by claiming they are just "tissues" like cancers or bad kidneys or are "parasitic growths" that need to be excised from the woman's body. But these "tissues" are not at all like cancers or bad kidneys because they contain hearts, livers, kidneys, brains, etc., and their own DNA. This moral relativism, of course, provides cover for the fact that a cancer or kidney or parasite will never be able to survive outside the body, but the human baby is a unique person who will be able to in a matter of weeks.
The abortion crowd and their defenders and proponents lament that the baby may be "defective" or born to poor or abusive parents, or it won't be properly cared for or properly educated (feeble-minded) and would, therefore, be a "drain on society" or possibly produce more progeny that would likewise be feeble-minded, so it would be "better off" if they were sucked out of the womb, chopped up, placed in red bags and incinerated. After all, who could couch such a thing as a youngster being born to "inferiors" or growing up in the company of "inferiors" and possibly producing more "inferior" offspring. Besides, those parts could better serve humanity through sacrificing their lives for research.
The devaluation of life is already public policy, as we see in the widespread acceptance of abortion. It’s certainly not surprising that a people who look on removing the soon-to-be-born from the womb as no more drastic than removing a decaying tooth from a mouth would come to believe that humans are expendable when they become inconvenient or sick; especially when it is supported by millions of dollars from the federal treasury.
This mindset is the same one of the progressive left in the early 20th century that gave us American and Nazi eugenicists. In 1935, the American Eugenics Society's dogma held that eugenics was a "racial preventive medicine" that sought to remove "degenerates" that were an "insidious disease" affecting the societal body in a similar manner to a cancer in the human body.
They justified their actions by dehumanizing their prey. Modern day eugenicists have just removed the racial component and decided that anyone who is unwanted or ill should be disposed of as societal preventive medicine.
In 2005 the Dutch became the first to permit euthanasia and propose guidelines for mercy killings of terminally ill newborns. The murder is carried out by administering a lethal dose of sedatives. We are told that Iceland has "basically eradicated, almost, Down syndrome." That's not true. But what is true is that in Iceland babies with chromosome abnormalities are eliminated in the womb because "Life isn't black and white. Life is grey."
Great Britain had the recent well-publicized state murders of Charlie Gard andAlfie Evans and in the U.S. we had Terri Schiavo — not a minor, but someone who was unable to make decisions for herself.
Medical ethicists — an apparent oxymoron — have long claimed that healthcare should be denied to those who aren't beneficial to society.
In his 1998 book, "The Ends of Human Life: Medical Ethics in a Liberal Polity," Ezekiel Emanuel, healthcare policy advisor under President Obama and brother of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, we find this passage:
| People aspire to be members of a community by participating in its political deliberations. Through such participation, citizens can realize political autonomy, that is, living under conditions they legislate. They can also realize certain capacities, such as the capacity for responsibility and moral reflection. And finally, through their participation in communal deliberations citizens become bound to the larger community, seeing their own interests in its common interest. In this way they transcend their individual existence to become part of an ongoing community with a posterity… Similarly, in the area of selecting medical interventions, the deliberative conception suggests that certain capacities are necessary for a worthy and meaningful life. Without the potential capacities for engaging in deliberations, one is not a full person." |
In other words, if grandma had a stroke and can't speak, or your brother is born mentally handicapped or is brain damaged from an accident, or a toddler has leukemia, then those people aren't "full persons," according to Emanuel. They don't have the potential to participate in political discussions, and participation in the transcendent community — and only that participation — is what grants complete personhood.
We have fallen into the dishonoring and demeaning state of moral or value relativism. We no longer know right from wrong. Nothing is black and white. Everything is a shade of gray — as the Icelandic abortion doctor says — which is to say that anything goes.
We are not-so-subtly being taught that sacrificing our children is honorable, desirable and even glorious and a service to our fellow man as long as it's carried out under the benevolence of the medical system or on behalf of the state.
We glorify our military "heroes" — especially in death — as those people we designate (volunteer) as sacrificial lambs to advance the empire. The people are under the misguided notion that they are thanking these soldiers for the service when, in reality, the people are being manipulated to accept that self-sacrifice is honorable and some lives must be sacrificed — at the direction of the elites — for wars and "police actions" that advance the "common good" — with common good being whatever the elites say it is. When we accept that sacrificing our military sons and daughters is honorable, extending this notion to everyone else is easy.
We condemn the eugenicists of the early 20th century, and rightly so. But today's eugenicists are considered enlightened forward thinkers and even patriots.
Dying under the pretense of sickness care is more benevolent than dying by a firing squad. Sickness care under all pretenses is benevolent. It is not possible for many Americans to identify sickness care with death.
Firing squads and death chambers cost the system money. On the other hand, imagine how much the medical system stands to profit from "sickness care" in America.
Arranging euthanasia by "mercy killing" and/or "sickness care" is far more acceptable and even benevolent. It's a simple trick of confusing cause and effect.
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