"Tried and Tested" and Other Lies the Death Cult Tells You
Advocates for assisted suicide gloss over the harsh realities of killing the weak
The bill to legalize assisted suicide in Maryland, again euphemistically called the “End-of-Life Option Act”, goes before the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee Tomorrow.
As always Compassion and Choices, more accurately formerly named the Hemlock Society, would like you to think that all of this is fine:
People in Maryland “should feel safe knowing that it’s tried and tested,” said Donna Smith, the Maryland and D.C. campaign director for the nonprofit group Compassion and Choices. “It’s not a large number of people that use this, but for the people that need it, it’s everything.”
By “tried and tested” of course, she means in places like Canada. Which recently tried to expand the ability of assisted suicide to those who are mentally ill and where FOUR percent of deaths were people legally killed by doctors last year.
Compassion and Choices was formed in 2007 as the successor to the more honestly named Hemlock Society.
The Hemlock Society, named as a reference to the famed suicide of Socrates, was founded in 1980. Its founder, Derek Humphry, stated that any assistance in one’s suicide should not be a crime and that alternate views of the “dying process” “must not trump the autonomy of the dying person’s own decisions.” Dr. Jack Kevorkian embodied this radical view of “autonomy” and the right to suicide. After Kevorkian’s public actions, in defiance of Michigan laws among others, states like Maryland affirmed their laws against assisted suicide. It is little wonder then that the current physician-assisted suicide movement seeks to rebrand itself to move past its Kevorikian past.
Likewise, proponents of physician-assisted suicide seek to avoid the term “suicide” itself. According to the Compassion and Choices website, what they propose is not physician-assisted suicide at all even though the bill specifically allows a physician to prescribe a lethal dose of medication that a patient self-administers to end their own life. Such absurd semantics are beyond Orwellian and demonstrate this movement's fundamental lack of honesty.
I’ve written about this issue extensively before:
Proponents make arguments based on emotions, but not much else. It reminds me of the old lawyer saying: “When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on your side, pound the law. When neither is on your side, pound the table.”
We’re all sympathetic to individuals and families facing terminal illnesses. My family has suffered through this. But some of the bravest, most determined people I have known are people who received a terminal diagnosis and wanted to live their life the best they could until the very end.
It’s offensive that assisted suicide proponents imply that those who fight the dying of the light somehow did not die with dignity.
The facts on assisted suicide are stark. The number of patients who have their time remaining misdiagnosed is high. There is no requirement that patients receive a psychological evaluation before being prescribed lethal drugs. Suicide contagion is real, an instance where non-physician assisted suicides spike in locations where assisted suicide is legal.
Assisted suicide is pushed by insurance companies and state Medicaid regimes as a cost-saving measure in lieu of actual treatment, such as when Barbara Wagner or Randy Stroup were denied life-extending treatment by bureaucrats in Oregon who instead offered to pay for their suicide.
When you see the facts, it’s no coincidence that assisted suicide has been defeated in every state has appeared on a ballot.
Greg Kline also wrote extensively about the issue at Red Maryland, including noting how overall suicides increased after the introduction of assisted suicide:
And it is little wonder that proponents of physician assisted suicide want to avoid engaging the issue of suicide directly. If they did they would have to respond to inconvenient facts like the recent study of the Southern Medical Journal finding that states that legalized physician assisted suicide saw an overall increase in the rate of suicide in the adult population, independent of those seeking physician assisted suicide. This documented “suicide contagion” comes at a time when our nation has seen an increase in the national adult suicide rate from 1999 to 2010 of nearly thirty percent.
More coverage here from 2019, including how assisted suicide hurts doctors, and 2020.
When the Death Cult says that assisted suicide is “tried and tested” what they mean is that it’s an effective way to legally kill the most vulnerable adults in a community in a way to make health care cheaper for the rest of it. It is a wicked and savage thing, and Marylanders should reject it out of hand.