The culture of death advances...

... and we in the West need a base from which to resist it. Baroness Warnock, an influential moral philosopher in the United Kingdom, has rightly provoked outrage over her suggestion that people suffering from dementia have a moral obligation to commit suicide. "If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives – your family's lives – and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service." Of course, this claim entails the further conclusion that those demented patients who refuse to do their duty should be euthanised.

To this appalling and predictable moral claim, one would expect a devastating response from those in the UK who value human life. Instead, we get this:

Neil Hunt, the chief executive of the Alzheimer's Society, said: "I am shocked and amazed that Baroness Warnock could disregard the value of the lives of people with dementia so callously. With the right care, a person can have good quality of life very late in to dementia. To suggest that people with dementia shouldn't be entitled to that quality of life or that they should feel that they have some sort of duty to kill themselves is nothing short of barbaric."

Hunt's response is equally as troubling as Warnock's claim. According to Warnock we should protect the right of demented patients to live because they might enjoy a "good quality of life." On that reasoning, those patients who do not or cannot enjoy a good quality of life -- one imagines that this is a majority -- are perfectly legitimate targets for termination. So Hunt has not refuted Warnock's claim, he has merely reduced by a small fraction the pool of candidates for Warnock's proposed euthanasia program.

This is the bind in which hyper-secular Europe finds itself. Having rejected the natural law and adopted consequentialist moral reasoning, it has no ground on which to resist the culture of death. Mr. Hunt and others who care about the mentally infirm could learn a lot from reading this blog.

UPDATE: The American Thinker makes an interesting point. Is this where we're headed if we adopt socialized medicine?

Fighting for Life

We have blogged about the proposal in Washington State to legalize assisted suicide and why it must fail (here and here). So we note with approval the formation of the Washington Coalition Against Assisted Suicide. In addition to information about the initiative in Washington, the site includes data on the disastrous experiments in Oregon and the Netherlands. The presentation is cursory, but the site gives a very good overview of what is at stake.

Washington State's dance with death

I found the text of the ballot initiative that would legalize assisted suicide in Washington State. As far as I can tell, it is modeled closely on Oregon's law. That alone is cause for concern, given Oregon's troubling experience with legalized human destruction over the last 13 years.

A couple of things in particular jump out. Under the definition of "competent" (sec. 1(3)) a patient's competency to make and communicate the decision to end her own life can be assessed by any of the following: a court, an attending or consulting physician, a psychiatrist, or a psychologist. The "or" is all-important. The statute does not require the patient (or, more likely, the patient's son, daughter, or other caregiver) to obtain an evaluation from a mental health professional. Section 6 of the initiative requires an attending or consulting physician to refer the patient to a mental health professional for counseling only if the physician first determines that the patient may be suffering from psychological or psychiatric disorder or depression. Because persons suffering from depression and other mental disorders are so vulnerable to the suggestion that they end their lives, these provisions seem reckless.

I searched in vain for a provision stating "It shall hereinafter be permitted..." or "This statute repeals any and all prohibitions against assisting suicide..." or "The assistance of suicide in the State of Washington, being not a crime or immoral act...". Instead, buried deep in the initiative, section 19 provides immunity from civil and criminal liability to anyone "participating in good faith compliance with this act." This is sly drafting, at least. The proponents of assisted suicide in Washington want the citizens of Washington to legalize the practice without having to express approbation for the practice. Of course, approval of self-destruction is implicit in any law that legalizes the assistance of suicide. Perhaps the proponents of the initiative know that the iniative would fail if voters were forced to think about what a "yes" vote means. For the sake of Washington State's sick and elderly population, I hope Washington's citizens are more thoughtful than the pro-death lobby assumes them to be.

A bad idea, revisited

Focus on the Family Action reports that Booth Gardner, former governor of Washington Sate, is advocating for a ballot initiative legalizing physician-assisted suicide in that State. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer confirms. Thus far, only Oregon has legalized the assistance of suicide in the United States; Washington would be second. Fortunately, Washington's current governor opposes the measure.

It was Washington's ban on assisted suicide that gave rise to the Supreme Court's watershed Glucksberg decision in 1997. The Court there affirmed the authority of states to prohibit the practice.

As many studies have shown (see, for example, the scholarship of Judge Neil Gorsuch), what is called for public-relations purposes "assisted suicide" is often, in truth, euthanasia. In Oregon and the Netherlands, anecdotal and statistical evidence suggusts that offspring and health care providers routinely pressure elderly parents and patients to shuffle off before their time. Remember, we're not talking about Terry Schiavo here. Most of these people are capable of living without extraordinary assistance. Most of them simply need a little help. The situation is so dire in western Europe that many elderly persons are now drafting living wills expressing their desire to be allowed to live.

Fundamentally, however, our disagreement with supporters of assisted suicide is over the value of human life. They think human life merely has instrumental value and that, once life ceases to be enjoyable, no reason commends preserving or defending it. We think human life has instrumental and intrinsic value; my life is valuable both because it enables me to enjoy friendship, skiing, and symphonies and because it is valuable qua human life. Human beings are reasons for action, in and of themselves. If once we lose sight of that truth, we have lost all.