We'd Better Open Our Eyes or This is Our Future: Suicide Assistance for the Elderly
An elderly man has traveled to Switzerland for an assisted suicide, accompanied by his wife. From the story:
Doctors from a euthanasia clinic held secret talks at Heathrow airport with a London pensioner before helping him die last week, the Standard has learned. A 90-year-old man named only as Chris--who was not terminally ill-died on Friday at Ex International, in Berne, after travelling to the Swiss capital with his wife on Tuesday.Suicide prevention is unmentioned. But why should we be surprised? The logic of the assisted suicide/euthanasia movement is turning us into a pro-suicide culture.
He is thought to be only the second Briton to die at the clinic, which until recently did not accept people from non-German-speaking countries. Chris, whose surname has not been revealed as he wanted privacy for his widow, had been planning to kill himself for about two years.
He arrived in Britain in 1938 after fleeing Nazi Austria and went on to teach physics and maths in Newcastle and later Birmingham University. After deciding to end his life because of his deteriorating health, he met leading figures behind the Swiss clinic at Heathrow --after they attended a meeting with British assisted-suicide campaigners in the summer last year.
The airport meeting was arranged by Chris's friend, the voluntary euthanasia campaigner Dr Michael Irwin, who had been due to accompany the pensioner to Berne but pulled because of illness.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 12:03 PM
6 Comments
6 Comments:
hm. So they were too sick to get there; are they planning to be euthanized in order to end their suffering, too?
"Secret meeting in an airport" -- what is this, like Deep Throat in the parking garage in the Watergate scandal? Like airline stewardesses running suitcases full of "pot" from California to the East Coast? Like a drug deal in a bus station?
If he's well enough to fly, and he's been planning to do this for two years because of his declining health, is he incapable of doing it without assistance? Why the big production with being met at the airport, going out of the country to the clinic...? I guess if he's been talking about it for two years and he does it and his wife doesn't stop him or call for help, she gets in trouble in Newcastle...but still, this is publicity and a big step for the clinic in Berne...now it's got international customers...
Oh, I see it was just the one guy who was couldn't show up because he was sick...funny how friends let friends down sometimes...and how he's the one who's said to have gotten sick when this kind of thing is enough to make the rest of the world sick, and in fact that's what it's doing.
Sorry -- can't resist the joke about bringing coals to Newcastle...in this case it's from Newcastle, but, like, there's not enough of this in Switzerland, they're importing now, becoming sort of a reverse Mecca?
It's not just our future; it's our present; we've already got "assisted suicide" for the elderly -- in the form of "living wills" that can now be "routinely" presented to them without sufficient information during the process of "estate planning." Not to mention the "assistance" doctors and hospitals give older people who have taken the, in effect, suicidal step of seeking medical care, going to hospital, etc.
I wish more people would focus on the plight of and danger to the elderly -- as they are the most vulnerable in a number of ways, and as more of us are apt to be in their situation one day than to become otherwise disabled, including those who promote the death culture, the most powerful and potentially effective, in terms of turning the tide, arguments can be made on their behalf.
At this time of year, I'm reminded of the fact that Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol has a strong thematic emphasis on the evils of Mathusian economics/philosophy. Mathus believed that the weak should be allowed to die so that they would 'decrease the surplus populations,' an exact quote from Mathus that Dickens lifted from his writings and put in Scrooge's mouth in order to show how abhorrent such sentiments were and extol Christian charity towards others. I think that if Dickens were writing 'A Christmas Carol' today, he would try to refute people like Lady Warnock, Peter Singer, and the euthanasia activists in this article instead.
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