"Those Who Hate Me, Love Death" [Proverbs 8:36]

Moral Clarity in a Murky World

We were encouraged by the following piece from LifeNews.com

American Psychiatric Association Takes Strong Stance Against Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia

Michael Cook

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has taken a strong stand against euthanasia. In a formal position statement approved by its board of trustees this month, it says:

This implies that it is not ethical for a psychiatrist to help a non-terminally ill person to commit suicide, either by providing the means or by direct lethal injection, as is being currently practiced in The Netherlands and Belgium.  Although this binds only APA members, the APA is one of the world’s most influential professional bodies. The World Psychiatric Association (WPA) is considering a similar statement.

Dr Mark S. Komrad, of the APA ethics committee, says that the APA is now in a position to formally protest the involvement of Dutch and Belgian psychiatrists in euthanising patients with non-terminal psychiatric disorders.  He fears that Canada and several states in the US are headed in the same direction. Already psychiatric patients are being helped to commit suicide by activist organisations like Final Exit.


“So far, no other country that has implemented physician-assisted suicide has been able to constrain its application solely to the terminally ill, eventually including non-terminal patients as legally eligible as well,” says Dr Komrad. “This is when psychiatric patients start to be included.”

The American Psychiatric Association, in concert with the American Medical Association’s position on Medical Euthanasia, holds that a psychiatrist should not prescribe or administer any intervention to a non-terminally ill person for the purpose of causing death.

It is inevitable that psychiatric patients have their wills and desires moulded and morphed by their affliction and illnesses.  They have lost touch with reality as their psychoses "take over".  As such their "will to die" is invalid and irrelevant.

But the "right to die" folk cannot exclude them, because in their inverted world-view the euthanizers insist upon the will of the subject being absolute.  The euthanoid has a sovereign will before which all other powers in the universe must bow.  Take that assertion away, and the case for euthanasia vanishes in a puff.  But human wills, if sovereign, must remain an absolute authority at all times whether a person is mentally ill or not.

Thus in every jurisdiction where a "right to die" has been declared legal, the range of subjects asserting their "rights" has rapidly expanded.  It begins with taking faux-pity upon the terminally ill.  It moves rapidly to encompass anyone, in any condition, at any age who wishes to die.  There is no barrier for it not thus to multiply and flourish.  If a terminally ill seventy year old has a recognized right-to-die an assisted death, so must a sixteen year old trans-gendered recanter.  Who are you, dear reader, to say otherwise, huh?