Talk about a death panel!
The House of Lords–pushed again to legalize assisted suicide–struggles with the nonsense of fashioning ”strict guidelines” to protect against abuse. (As I have repeatedly shown, guidelines don’t protect, they just give the illusion of control.)
The latest scheme is to create what could be called “suicide courts,” where suicidal people will ask a judge to approve their doctor-prescribed death. From the Independent story:
Judges could routinely be given the power of life or death over patients who are determined to die to end their suffering.
Proposals to use judges as the final arbiters of who can be helped to die go some way to satisfying opponents to Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill. Lord Pannick QC proposed judicial oversight in amendments to the Bill which went before the House of Lords yesterday. The Lords, in the first Parliamentary vote on the Bill, gave it their approval.
This is nuts! This would be worse than Oregon, in some ways, more destructive than Belgium and the Netherlands!
Assisted suicide should be illegal because it amounts to a joint enterprise to end a human life.
With legalization, you have private transactions between doctors and suicidal patients. It’s wrong, but the government isn’t officially or directly involved in the death.
But a suicide court would make the government a direct participant in suicide. The State would be ruling that some lives are not worth living. It would give an explicit imprimatur to suicide.
That’s a huge and dangerous step that should never be taken.
And here’s the irony: The UK opposes the death penalty. Trying to accommodate the Culture of Death is driving us out of our minds.
By Wesley J. Smith
Editor’s note. This appeared on Wesley’s great blog.
