Why #Euthanasia and #AssistedSuicide Is a Bad Idea - Part 2

About this sermon

You might think that people in their final hours are needlessly suffering and since death is inevitable, why withhold it from them? In some conversations I’ve had, it was described as cruel to force someone in that situation to suffer by withholding death, but that’s a complete misrepresentation of what’s happening. Forcing something or someone is a description of what someone is doing. If we say that you are forcing someone to suffer, then you’re implying that you are the cause of their suffering or that your actions are creating suffering when in fact, the suffering that occurs at death is a natural and inevitable part of the process. Allowing the inevitable process of death to run its course, is not the same as being the cause of suffering. Nobody is forcing suffering to occur. Suffering is part of life and happens all on its own. What about the moral misgivings of care providers as well? If we normalize the practice of prematurely killing people, then this is something that healthcare providers would have to become accustomed to. What about the emotional and psychological stress (or suffering) that would be caused to them by injecting people with lethal doses of poison as part of their work day. I doubt you’d appreciate the government one day changing your job description to include suicidal collaboration. When we say that it is our right to die when we please, we seem to be forgetting that this so called right is contingent on the actions of others, in this case doctors and nurses. If it’s your right, then any possible refusal on their part would be a violation of your rights. It used to be that our human rights were based on what people weren’t allowed to do us. Now, out of some perverse sense of entitlement, we seem to believe that our rights are based on what others must do for us. I don’t believe in any human right that forces someone else to serve my wishes whether they want to or not. In my books, that’s called tyranny. So, when we argue that death is better than suffering, we as a society, are signalling to ourselves, that unnatural death is no longer the tragedy that we’ve always treated it as, but simply one more way to treat the symptoms of life. When we say that death is a legitimate solution to subjectively defined intolerable suffering, we are endorsing every suicide and every suicide attempt as a licit action because nobody attempts suicide under any other circumstances. Traditionally, as a society, our response to that has been to intervene and help vulnerable people overcome their suffering but in a world that institutionally and legally recognizes that death is better than suffering, we are instead endorsing, if not encouraging, their suicidal tendencies. And what about other people who are vulnerable to the effects of the normalization of killing people who require medical intervention. As our population ages, elder abuse is something that is becoming more an more common.This is the phenomenon in which family members or care providers are treating older vulnerable citizens abusively because they can. It includes physical and verbal abuse, neglect, manipulation, and, in many cases, financial abuse. There are far too many people who care more about their inheritance than the still living person that they expect to inherit from. If we don’t think that these same victims of abuse will not be pressured into prematurely ending their lives, then we are recklessly deceiving ourselves. Advocates seem respond to any and all of these concerns with the strict safeguards. As long as we have well defined rules about how to go about killing people, then nobody will get hurt right? Again, I actually do sympathize with this argument, however; in every jurisdiction where they’ve gone forward with it, the safeguards have been useless. For example, the safeguards in places like the Netherlands and Belgium say that the request for euthanasia or assisted suicide has to be voluntary, well-considered, informed, and persistent over time. In spite of that, in 2005, 1 in 5 deaths by euthanasia were involuntary and nobody has bothered to raise the alarm or introduce penalties for those abuses. In Belgium, the rate of euthanasia without consent is 3 times higher. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3070710/ Please comment with your ideas about the video and if you find it interesting, please share it and subscribe. Twitter: https://twitter.com/briankeepsworth Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brianholdsworthmedia Business: https://www.holdsworthdesign.com