Summary:
Since abortion was legalized in 1973, we have noticed in this country and elsewhere the gradual decline of respect for life in all its various stages and challenges and disabilities.
If we can deny the right to life of the most vulnerable among us, how much easier has it become to question the right to life of the physically challenged, the elderly and those who are suffering. The acceptance of abortion in this country has brought us to a "slippery slope" -where the concepts of infanticide, euthanasia and assisted suicide are the next battlefronts.
How are abortion, euthanasia infanticide and assisted suicide related? Someone else has decided that the life in question has no value. Does anyone have the right to make a determination on the value of another human life?
- What is euthanasia? The ending of a human life by another human being
- What us infanticide? Deliberately causing the death of an infant (usually handicapped) directly or indirectly
- What is assisted assisted suicide? Providing the physical means for a person to commit suicide.
Euthanasia and assisted suicide are now legal practices in the Netherlands (since 2001). Assisted suicide is legal in the state of Oregon.
- Legalized euthanasia raises the potential of conflicts within the managed healthcare system where the cost savings represented by euthanasia become more attractive than long-term care
- Abuses? Duty to die? "Terminal" vs. physically or mentally "unbearable".
- Please refer to www.euthanasia.com for very up-to-date info on this topic.
- Dr. Jack Kevorkian - responsible for 130 deaths
Increasingly, the debate about euthanasia/ assisted suicide/ infanticide centers on the issue of the "quality of life".
- Is there a consensus on what constitutes a "quality existence"?
- Peter Singer, Australian bioethicist, whose position on the "quality" of life issue is so strong as to say that "killing a disabled infant in not morally equivalent to killing a person. On staff of Princeton Univ., he considers the lives of disabled persons not worth living.
What are the pro-life responses to such debates/ trends?
- When we adequately treat pain and depression, the wish to die usually recedes
- Hospice care is life-affirming; allowing for patients peaceful death with dignity that allows for love, forgiveness, gratitudes and goodbyes.
- Compassion - the ability to "suffer with"-is what is truly killed in euthanasia
