The Mess of Pottage That is Euthanasia

To Die Or Not to Die That is the Question

New Zealand is going through yet another debate on "euthanasia".  Another bill to institutionalise "euthanasia" is before the Parliament.  The usual suspects are hard at work pushing it mightily.  Given that New Zealand is a thoroughly pagan society--one where the predominant religion is atheistic secularism--it would appear to be only a matter of time before the death cult has its way.

Euthanasia is underpinned by a philosophical principle which espouses a particular human right.  It rests upon the doctrine that human beings have a right to determine their own deaths.  If human beings have no such right, then euthanasia is a great evil.  But let us assume for the present that they do have such a right.  Let us assume that the right to choose death is one more faux human right dreamed up by pagan philosophers and professional ethicists. Let us assume further that euthanasia is not just a freedom right (people have a right to kill themselves if they chosoe) but it is also a demand right (society must facilitate, assist and enable people to kill themselves).

At present the issue before the country is whether elderly or terminally ill people have a right to take their own lives (either by their own hand, or assisted by others).  Let us repeat: these people have a right to terminate their own lives, say the protagonists--so much so that if any body or institution interfere with their taking their own life, they are breaching the human rights of that person.  In its strongest demand right sense, people have a right to have their self-death funded and facilitated by the state.

The debate is also being framed at present by an appeal to pity.

Youth Euthanasia

Sauce For Goose and Gander

New Zealand has a real problem with young people committing suicide.  Generally, no-one thinks it's a good idea.  You know, a sixteen year old hanging himself, or deliberately stepping out in front of a train--that sort of thing.

Those folk who oppose such actions--and these folk represent the vast majority, if not every adult in the country--are little more than bleeding heart fraudsters and dupes.  What on earth is wrong with a teenager taking his or her own life?  Seriously.

Long ago--well, a few decades ago--suicide used to be categorised as a sin, an ultimate act of rebellion against God.  But then God was "kicked for touch" so to speak, and the culture was suddenly awash with formal and informal fallacies, which is a polite was of saying that no-one could think straight any more.  Pretty much every social issue became filtered through emotive arguments.  In this case, when it comes to youth suicide emotion takes the form of the Appeal to Pity.  But not just the death of youth.  Assisted dying for the aged is also seen through the filter of Appeals to Pity.  This poor old person is ill, dispirited, discouraged.  If we really had pity upon him, we would help him on his way.  We would facilitate a painless, peaceful death for him.  Pity justifies such an act as morally good.

But some have sought to go beyond emotive arguments to justify helping the aged end their lives.

In Love With Death

Suicide: The Next Civil Rights Frontier

Only someone tone-deaf to what’s going on in culture will fail to understand how we’re only a few logical steps away from suicide being an act of personal expression.

By Peter Burfeind
The Federalist

One staple of conservative conversation these days is the parlor game of cultural prognostication: What will the lunatics come up with next?

We’ve only tapped the surface of sexual deviancy, so God only knows what’s in store for us there. Diaper-wearing men diagnosed—back when the notion of “disordered behavior” meant something—with paraphilic infantilism? “Dommes” walking their leather-clad coprophiliac slaves on a leash? (I saw an article entitled, “Coprophilia: Symptom, Cause and Treatment” at a website on depression. I thought, “Awww, how cute; so 2012.”)

After last summer’s gay marriage ruling coupled with this year’s transgendered march through the institutions, you can only imagine the flavors of sadomasochistic fetishism lining up to take their turn at the bat. The natural response of “eww” that used to guide social behavior is a microagression, so it’s only a matter of time.

Identity holds a lot of promise for potential wackiness.

Reaping the Whirlwind

No Slippery-Slope Here

When the centre is lost, nothing holds.  When a culture turns away from the Lord and Giver of life, death becomes the answer.

Twenty-Year Old Euthanised

Sex abuse victim in her 20s allowed by doctors to choose euthanasia due to ‘incurable’ PTSD

News.com

WHEN we think about euthanasia, many of us picture an elderly person.  They’ve had many good years, but an illness has ruined their quality of life. They’re in pain, and they want to end things on their own terms. For many people, this is an easy concept to accept.

But a recent case in the Netherlands is getting a lot of media attention, and it’s troubling ethicists.  A sexual abuse victim in her 20s was allowed to go ahead with assisted suicide as she was suffering from “incurable” post-traumatic-stress disorder (PTSD), according to the Dutch Euthanasia Commission.

The Growing Love of Death

The Satan's Final Work

We were struck recently by the declaration attributed to British author, Terry Pratchett in one of the many tributes after his death.  Pratchett had been suffering from early onset Alzheimers.

He also explored the case for assisted suicide in an acclaimed TV documentary. "Either we have control of our lives, or we do not," he said. [NZ Herald]

Herein lies the philosophical and ethical rationale for suicide.

Hurry Up and Die, Would You

The Danger of Assisted Suicide Laws

15 October 2014

 

CNN 14 October 2014
My heart goes out to Brittany Maynard, who is dying of brain cancer and who wrote last week about her desire for what is often referred to as “death with dignity.” Yet while I have every sympathy for her situation, it is important to remember that for every case such as this, there are hundreds — or thousands — more people who could be significantly harmed if assisted suicide is legal.

The legalization of assisted suicide always appears acceptable when the focus is solely on an individual. But it is important to remember that doing so would have repercussions across all of society, and would put many people at risk of immense harm. After all, not every terminal prognosis is correct, and not everyone has a loving husband, family or support system.

As an advocate working on behalf of disability rights for 37 years, and as someone who uses a wheelchair, I am all too familiar with the explicit and implicit pressures faced by people living with chronic or serious disability or disease. But the reality is that legalizing assisted suicide is a deadly mix with the broken, profit-driven health care system we have in the United States.

The Execration of All Things

A Meditation Upon Suicide

The chattering classes have been animated in recent days over a young female cancer sufferer who has made plans to kill herself.  She has been, and continues to be a "Right to Death" advocate.  The media have lionised her, lauded her, and praised her to the skies as a great example for us all.  What courage!  What dedication!

G.K. Chesterton wrote the following in his essay, "The Flag of the World". It will help us reflect more closely upon such things:

. . . an argument arose whether it was not a very nice thing to murder one's self.  Grave moderns told us that we must not even say "poor fellow," of a man who has blown his brains out, since he was an enviable person, and had only blown them out because of their exceptional excellence.  Mr William Archer even suggested that in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man could kill himself for a penny.  In all this I found myself utterly hostile to man who called themselves liberal and humane.

Letter From America (About Emotive Detritus)

There Is Nothing Brave About Suicide

Matt Walsh

Oct. 9, 2014\

TheBlaze

If you spend any time on Facebook then you’ve probably seen Brittany Maynard’s face pop up on your newsfeed over the last few days. And your Facebook friends sharing links to stories about her have probably included supportive and adoring captions like the one I just saw a couple of minutes ago: “Wow. What an inspiring story! Brittany, you are so brave!!”

You’ll be excused if you’ve chosen not to click and read further. We are all so overloaded with social media-provided ‘inspiration’ that it’s getting hard to ingest any more of it. But before you continue on with your day, harboring the vague impression that someone out there named Brittany Maynard is apparently performing a heroic and awesome deed of some kind, I think you should know what it is, exactly, that has all of your friends so inspired:

On November 1st of this year, 29-year-old Brittany Maynard is going to kill herself.  With the help of a doctor and a poison pill, she is going to end her life.  Suicide.

Remembering

Tragically Sad, On Many Counts

The chattering classes have been all agog and aghast over the suicide of Charlotte Dawson.  We did not know her.  We never followed her career.  We suppose it's fair to characterise that career--what we know of it--as being one of a semi-celeb, a media personality.  It is a part of modern society's interests that we find desperately narcissistic and as deep as a puddle in a parking lot.

However, that is not to say that Dawson herself was narcissistic or shallow.  We just don't know.  We do know, however, that constantly needing to self-promote and "stay in the public eye" so media contracts come along must be a depressing slog for anyone.  Friends have said they knew her to be warm, funny, intelligent and generous.  She also battled with depression, eventually losing not just the battle, but the war.  Now the chattering classes are trying to use her death to make common cause against cyber bullying--all of which seems a bit mercantile and tawdry, the wickedness of bullying notwithstanding.

But for us the really, really sad part is highlighted by columnist, Miranda Devine, writing in The Daily Telegraph 

Branding Matters

Getting Our "Positioning" Right

New Zealand has a problem with youth suicides.  There are too many of them.  Way too many.  We posted recently that a national newspaper had this to say:

The deaths from the Taupo Bay area in the Far North follow the Herald on Sunday's reports on a similar cluster [of youth suicides) in Kawerau two years ago. These, and the country's relentlessly high suicide rate, are now prompting calls for a nationwide suicide prevention publicity programme similar to that used to combat depression - and for government funding to be more effectively targeted.

The secular world is finds itself in serious in conflict over young people taking their own lives.  On the one hand there is this brute reality that every fibre of our being screams out that it is wrong. But, on the other hand, secular amorality also insists that there can be nothing immoral or unethical about the act itself.  So we are filled with pity and guilt without any ethical warrant.  We are all dressed up with nowhere to go.  We know we are sad, but unsure whether we ought to be.

Teenage Suicides

The Crown of Secular Amorality

New Zealand has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the developed world. Often-times these appear as "outbreaks"--a cluster of suicides occurring in small communities.  The working assumption is that the news spreads amongst the small community by word of mouth, Chinese whispers, social media, and conversations around the dinner table.  Everyone knows, but no-one talks about it.

The latest spate of youth suicides (five so far, one as young as ten years old) have occurred in Taupo Bay  in the far north.  They follow a similar outbreak in Kawerau two years ago.  The tragedy is palpable.  The stupidity and senselessness of the suicides overwhelming.  The cold, hard reality is that there was nothing in these young lives so discouraging or so bad to justify such gross actions.  That they thought there was indicates that these kids had departed from the realms of reality and truth and had entered a destructive fantasy realm.  The realm in which so many of their parents live and in which our society glories.

New Human Rights Discovered

Giving Death Its Due

Well, we are really starting to cook with gas now.  The European Court of Human Rights has decided to rule on the matter of assisted suicide.  How come?

This judgment rests on the notion that suicide has acquired the quality of an individual right or freedom (§ 66), and so a deontological norm cannot impede its exercise: it is for the law to regulate, even if it is realised through the art of medicine.

In other words, since suicide is a human right, the state and the courts had better ensure that folk get to do it.  Failure to do so, to impede them, would be a breach of human rights.  Sickness, illness, physical decrepitude (a kind of deontological norm) has nothing to do with it.   Don't you just love that phrase: "deontological norm" to describe a rule, such as human affliction which is undermining quality of life.  Such afflictions, which are usually offered as justifying a person killing themselves, are irrelevant.  Killing oneself is a human right, a human freedom, you see. 

Now we perceive great benefits to come from this.

Homosexual Suicide and False Hopes

Hope Deferred Makes the Heart Sick

The NZ Herald is running a pro and con series on homosexual "marriage".  One piece by a minor public celebrity includes this attempt at prophecy:

When we start telling our kids and our grandkids that being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered is okay, they will stop killing themselves. They will feel like contributing members of society.

The suppressed premises in this bald assertion are as follows: the cause of high suicide rates amongst homosexuals is society's heretofore disapproval of homosexuality.  Society does not like homosexuality, therefore homosexuals are depressed; if a homosexual commits suicide the cause is society's disapproval of homosexuality. 

To someone with no memory this may sound a substantial argument, but anyone who is not comatose knows that homosexuality has been trumpeted and promoted and wowed over for decades in the public sphere.  It has been promoted in schools.  It has been celebrated in women's magazines.  It has been defended in law.  Homosexuality has become a much vaunted and celebrated human right.  It would seem that the suppressed premises are wrong.

The Curse of Suicide

Why Our Young People Kill Themselves

Youth suicide has again hit the headlines in New Zealand--as it likely will for years to come.  The coronial service now releases figures along with a commentary regularly, so it is kept front and centre. 

Speculation swirls around the causes.  Why does New Zealand have such a high youth suicide rate?  No-one really knows.  There is not enough causal evidence one way or the other, we are told.  This vacuum allows folk to trot out the usual line-up of suspects: poverty, alcohol, drugs, no jobs, etc.  Plenty more could be added. 

It seems reasonable to hold that the causes are multi-valent.  But since everyone is reduced to speculation on the causes, we will add ours.