Do We Need Suicide Clinics As They Have in Switzerland
‘I wept as I watched my parents die hand in hand’: Son of conductor and wife who died at assisted suicide clinic speaks of parents’ last moments.
The son of conductor Sir Edward Downes told today how he and his sister wept as they watched their parents die hand-in-hand at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.
Sir Edward, 85, and his 74-year-old wife Joan had travelled to the controversial assisted suicide clinic to end their lives after Joan was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the liver and pancreas.
‘They drank a small quantity of clear liquid and then lay down on the beds next to each other and within a couple of minutes they were asleep and died within 10 minutes,’ said Caractacus Downes.
‘They wanted to be next to each other when they died. They held hands across the beds.’
See Daily Mail UK for the story
Setting aside my religious objections to suicide being a mortal sin, I must ask if it is in the interest of a civilized society to not only approve of suicide, but by private donations, pressure on insurance companies and/or public money for America to provide the facilities, tools and physician assistance for these acts?
First, we have through many of our laws and public attitudes been slowly developing a culture of death in the west and in the process we have only cheapened the value of all human life. So much so that, most Pro-Choice advocates insist a baby in the womb is not human at all. So the question is this; do we really want, as a civilized, mostly religious minded people, to continue to devalue human life in America? Won’t physician assisted suicide play a role in that coarsening of our culture regarding life and death?
Once we, as a people, have accepted the idea that human life in some circumstances and conditions is disposable that, certain socially undesireable human beings can be exterminated or helped to die without their committing a capital crime and without due process; at what point do we as a nation approve of active euthanization of mentally and/or emotionally retarded people, or people of some inferior racial characteristics or for their political beliefs. It has happened before, in Nazi Germany, Russia, The Peoples Republic of China and in other places and times; and now it appears we are marching down the same road.
So, it is my belief that physician assisted suicide, no matter how compassionate it may seem in some cases, even in the case of extreme pain, we are building one more brick on the road to our self destruction.
