Softball Interview With Accused Final Exit Network Accused Felon Ted Goodwin
The media love social outlaws, particularly those involved with assisted suicide, and rarely challenge them in interviews or journalistic profiles--a phenomenon I have discussed here at SHS before. That could explain why Ted Goodwin, the former head of Final Exit Network and vice president of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies, sat down with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for a chat, despite being under indictment: He knew he had nothing to fear.
True to form, Goodwin is not challenged or pressed. I mean catch the first question! From the interview:
Q: Tell me about the first "exit" you participated in. Were you scared?Compassionate Ted was apprehensive, we learn, but his first suicide thought he was an "angel," and so a life's purpose was found.
Asked if he is religious, Goodwin soothes:
Every day of my upbringing my parents taught me decency and generosity and compassion for others. And so that's my spirituality. I look upon what we do as a ministry.The tough interlocutor then asks how Goodwin "feels" when someone he has just been talking to expires:
This is a very difficult job to be able to befriend someone, to visit them sometimes four, five and six times--talk with them over the phone--and then to know that someday you're going to be in attendance when they end their own lives. It takes a real mental strength to be able to deal with that and not emotionally dissolve...But he has what it takes and selflessly carries on. And here's a question that begged a follow up, which unsurprisingly, was never asked:
Q: Why do you accept people who are not terminal?I wonder why the interviewer didn't ask Goodwin why FEN cleans up after the suicide, removing the helium canister and the bag used to cause death. I wonder why he didn't bring up the Phoenix case in which a mentally ill woman was, it is suspected, "counseled" by FEN representatives. I wonder why he didn't mention that the man he is accused of assisting in suicide had been successfully treated for cancer.
A: Why should we make that decision for someone, that their suffering is any less than those that have, by the grace of God, a time limit on their suffering?
Oh never mind: I am spitting into the wind.
Labels: Assisted Suicide. Media Bias. Final Exit Network. Ted Goodwin.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:43 AM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
This just hurts me. A few months ago, I started talking with a young woman who said that she wanted assisted suicide to be legalized for depressed people because she was being molested and abused by a family member and went to bed crying every night. I emailed her and we started talking. She seems to have gone on with her life and taken positive steps to leave her situation rather than commit suicide. I feel badly that her
You Tube account got cancelled and I really don't know what has happened to her. But, what I said to her was that people in our society were letting her down if we
didn't help her get out of her situation and instead helped her kill herself. This person is only eighteen. These groups threaten such vulnerable people and just leave them to their misery when they are hurting do to a very bad situation that requires intervention. It makes me want to cry.
The media loved Obama, too.
You did good, SAFEpres.
Oh, gosh, SAFEpres.. Let's hope that she violated YouTube TOS as multiple times it has come out that FEN instructs people to eliminate all evidence of themselves online.. By that, one would say they mean any sign they were asking just what she was asking you..
You did great in what you shared with her.. Have been doing this for quite some time now.. There is only so much we can humanly do from our Keyboards..
Am reading into what you share that it's a similar message that I carry everywhere myself.. Somewhat related, a local took his Life after a police chase, I guess like yesterday'ish.. Turns out another recent mysterious death this past weekend is connected.. I did my part to nudge the media that they MUST do their job in discovering the "why" because communities need to know what they are missing to curb such loss..
As for the article, Wesley, am simultaneously emailing Ms. Bentley (came here for the URL to forward).. Am asking her to please elaborate (hopefully over here) with respect to your question so that the current appearance that the AJC is biased towards assisted suicide may be squelched..
Warmest cyber hugs to all from North Georgia.. :wink:
So they visit four, five, "even" six times. I've seen that, and those who do it. It's hardly the same as knowing and understanding the person and their real situation. Oh, he even talked to them on the phone. Well, isn't that special. What a brave, strong, and true man he is.
Wesley: No you and SHA aren't. Nor would the wind ever do anything that is so much against nature as what is being fought against here.
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