LIFE MATTERS: The deadly folly of euthanasia exposed twice in one week

Life Matters is a weekly opinion column which appears
EXCLUSIVELY on Semper Vita every Friday morning

By Brendan Malone

It is not often that two important, but completely unrelated stories, about the same issue break in the same week, but that’s exactly what happened over the past week when two very different, but very important stories relating to the issue of euthanasia broke.

The first was the tragic story about a seventeen year old NZ man who has been charged with assisted suicide for helping a seventeen year old friend to kill himself in a Christchurch park in September.

What this tragic event exposes is the grand flaw which lies at the heart of the pro-euthanasia ideology – the idea that suicide is a good thing, and that assisting someone to take their own life is an act of mercy.

Any rational person who saw this story would have been immediately sickened, saddened or horrified by what they read.

I seriously doubt that anyone would have been thinking to themselves that the 16 year old victim had made a courageous and empowered decision which reflected his personal autonomy and the right to decide his own fate in the face of a quality of life that was no longer appealing to him.

And I seriously doubt that anyone would have thought that the 17 year old who assisted in this suicide was doing something caring and merciful, and that the law should be more compassionate and allow his friend a public facility with trained medical staff to help him carry out his wish for the right to die.

Now here comes the complete and utter mental disconnect that goes on within our culture…

Let’s imagine for a minute that instead of two teenagers, this incident had involved two 60 year olds, and that the 60 year old who had died in this suicide pact had a disease or a disability.

Under such a scenario, there is absolutely no doubting that fact that not only would a majority of people in this country have considered this act of assisted suicide acceptable, they would be chastising the police for charging the man who assisted his friend to die, and Michael Laws would be using this incident as a vehicle to promote his pro-euthanasia ideologies on his talkback show.

Yet because it involves young people, with no known illnesses, people are saddened and horrified.

Why?

Well, because our culture has fallen into a philosophical trap which completely confuses and rejects the great, and inalienable dignity and worth of the human person, and instead embraces the idea that your life only has worth if it meets a certain set of criteria – all of which are totally arbitrary.

So, according to this pernicious little ideology, if you’re seventeen and you’re relatively disease and disability free, then your life has great worth and it is too valuable for suicide.

But if you’re elderly, or disabled or sick, then your life all of a sudden has very little worth and suicide is the best thing you could do with your relatively valueless existence.

Sure, a sixty five year old person, or a person with a terminal illness is probably not going to live as long as a sixteen year old, and a disabled or elderly person can’t surf the break at Raglan, climb Mount Cook or compete in Dancing with the Stars, but so what?

Their life is no less valuable or less worthy of life than yours or mine, yet sadly, this is exactly the evil and false distinction that all pro-euthanasia ideologies proclaim.

Not only that, but at the heart of the pro-euthanasia ideology is a confused view of personal autonomy which believes that every human being should have the right to exercise total freedom and choice about how and when their life will come to an end.

So why is it that so many Kiwis, who are pro-euthanasia, should have been horrified when, earlier this week, they heard about a seventeen year old male who exercised the freedom to choose how and when his life would come to an end – after all, this is the very heart of their pro-euthanasia beliefs, and it is something that many of them call a “right”.

The other story broke just two days ago, and it is about a Belgian man who was wrongly diagnosed as being in a Persistent Vegetative State (PVS) after a car accident, and then left totally conscious, and unable to communicate or interact with anyone for 23 years.

His erroneous diagnosis was discovered by a doctor using state of the art equipment.

It’s quite amazing that this man wasn’t killed by euthanasia, because he was labelled as a “vegetable” for 23 years, and during that time he was totally unable to communicate the fact that he truly was a living, breathing disabled person, who simply wasn’t able to interact with anyone.

What this case highlights, once again, is the very dubious nature of the PVS diagnosis – which, despite all the pro-euthanasia hype and media confusion, is nor a universally accepted, or defined condition.

Many of you will remember the case of Terri Schiavo, sister of Semper Vita contributor Bobby Schindler – she was killed in 2005 by the state of Florida because it was claimed that she was in a PVS.

Her family fought courageously to save Terri’s life, but sadly her ex-husband won the court battles and was able to proceed with the brutal state mandated starvation and dehydration of Terri.

This was all despite the fact that, unlike this Belgian man, Terri was actually interacting with the people she came in contact with.

As if that wasn’t sick enough, not long after Terri’s death pro-euthanasia supporters, who had endorsed her brutal killing, then had the gall to suggest that her case highlighted why legalized euthanasia involving more humane and painless methods of killing, like lethal injections, was urgently required.

The simple truth is that our level of knowledge about the human brain is barely at a kindergarten level, there is a vast amount of information that we just don’t know – which is what makes the PVS diagnosis all the more dubious, especially when it is used with such binding authority and finality, as it was to end the life of Terri Schiavo.

Doctor Steven Laureys, the man who discovered that that this Belgian man was actually conscious, has since tested other patients with the same techniques and he has discovered that there are other people who have some degree of awareness of the outside world – although he won’t say how many at this stage.

This case highlights the totally anti-human and dispassionate ideologies that have crept into our cultural consciousness of late, the end result of which is that real human beings are either treated as little more than vegetables, or are killed, simply because we now choose to qualify their personhood, rights and worth based solely on subjective, speculative and arbitrary criteria that lack philosophical soundness and reason.