Virtue Magazine

“Legislation that permits doctors to assist in suicide fundamentally changes the role of doctor from someone who cures or cares to a killer.” ₁

Forget the doctors doing the actual administering of the drugs to kill a terminally ill patient. Today people are so desperate to legalize euthanasia that they turn to physician-assisted suicide as holding the magic answer—if the patient is the one to actually administer the drugs it can’t be so bad. Or can it?

To Lord Joel Joffe, who based his bill off of a law in the state of Oregon, euthanasia was necessary to end the suffering of those who were terminally ill. “We cannot sit back and complacently accept that terminally ill patients who are suffering unbearably should just continue to suffer for the good of society as a whole,” he reasoned. ₂

Euthanasia advocates would be jumping on the bandwagon when it comes to the bill that Lord Joffe proposed. Proponents of the death of Terri Schiavo would definitely support such a piece of legislation should it be proposed in the United States. But even this bill does not make provisions for those who are so terminally ill that they themselves cannot administer the drugs on their own. And perhaps Lord Joffe realized that addressing that would cause even more of a stir than already would be created.

As was to be expected, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Roman Catholic Cardinal, and the Chief Rabbi issued a joint letter stating their problems with the bill and why they felt that it should be failed. They stated that they believed that “Such a bill cannot guarantee that a right to die would not, for society’s most vulnerable, become a duty to die”. 2 The Archbishop said that life was “a gift from God that we cannot treat as a possession of our own to keep or throw away”. ₃

Yet as is the case with illegal immigration and the wish to shoot those seen crossing the border, it seems to all draw back to Adolf Hitler and his desire for a master Aryan race. Or perhaps we can go even further back to Charles Darwin and the survival of the fittest. After all, the weak, the poor, the sick, the elderly—they are not necessary to the survival of the human race, are they? Obviously the United Kingdom seems to think they are, since after seven hours of debate the House of Lords failed the bill. But what about the rest of the world?

1 Julia Millington, director of the Pro-Life Alliance http://www.thegoodnews.co.uk/regionnewsstory.asp?id=1181&region=reg0
2 The Australian http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19120316-23109,00.html
3 BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4323586.stm