The right to choose evil
I have received many replies to my recent Idleposts touching upon “physician-assisted suicide,” the latest “human right” created by Canada’s activist, forward-looking Supreme Court, which now rewrites our laws freely. They are seldom first in the world on any issue, but since the Omnibus Bill of the Trudeau government gutted our Criminal Code in 1969, they have shown much enterprise getting to the front of the avant-garde. They may not have been the pioneers of abortion-on-demand, for instance, but made us the first, and since, the world’s only jurisdiction to allow abortion with no restrictions whatever, from conception to live birth if not later. It seems a point of pride with them, to stay one step ahead of the Joneses to our south, though it should be said the Americans catch up quickly.
According to the standard media account, death-on-demand was a Swiss specialty, before being popularized in the Low Countries. Judge-assisted death-on-demand has followed in two of the United States; and is now quickly spreading through what was once Christendom — even to Germany, where the term “euthanasia” acquired a bad reputation in light of the way it was used through the period 1933–45.
Media enthusiasts for “assisted suicide” are too shy to mention the truly pioneering work of the Nazi Party, arguing when they must that most of the many millions of deaths were not strictly voluntary. But the Nazis used the same arguments as our own euthanasia activists, to start, and were very keen on “progress.” Verily, they were the great Autobahn for physician-assisted everything since hallowed by progressives, from anti-smoking legislation to the slaughter on high-speed highways, which is why I am fond of the expression, “The Autobahn to Hell.” They were heroic Darwinians, and the idea of moving nature along a little faster, with respect to “useless” people, slightly preceded their more far-reaching programmes for Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others on the principle, “every minority a wanted minority.”
Among their first efforts was, for instance, the Kinder-Euthanasie pilot project, in which thousands of mentally and physically handicapped children — “an expense to society and a tribulation to their parents” — were turned over at parental request for “special medical care.” Of course, the parents did not know what would happen to them. No one in Germany ever knew what was happening anywhere in those days, let alone in front of their faces, as we learnt later in the Nuremberg Trials — where quite a few “assisting physicians” were prosecuted. These included those who, like Hitler’s personal physician and Reich Commissar for Health and Sanitation, Karl Brandt, had previously received the highest awards of the state. (Josef Mengele got away, however.)
Canada’s own Doktor Mengele, the late Henry Morgentaler, who personally executed many thousand unborn babies, actually received an Order of Canada “for his commitment to increased health care options for women,” along with the highest award of the Canadian Labour Congress for his “outstanding service to humanity” — favours which, prior to his profitable abortion clinics, had included vasectomies and inserting IUDs. The paradox was in his own background as a Jew from the Lodz ghetto, who saw the inside of Dachau as a child. (He was hardly the only man twisted by the experience.)
“We must remain vigilant in defence of a woman’s right to choose,” he famously said, and said, in self-celebration. And now the “right to choose” death over life, for oneself as for others, is fully roosted in Canadian law.
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As a visitor to nursing homes (though shamefully much less since my mother died), I retain contacts among many gerontophiles. I have heard from several since last Friday, expressing their desolation at the Supreme Court decision. Let me quote one especially well-placed:
“This decision will blow apart our ability to do what we do. …
“Our work force is largely female, visible minority, and Christian: just try finding someone to pick up replacement shifts on Sundays. Love is truly the fuel for our staff, most of whom see their careers as a calling. …
“Physicians do not provide care alone, they depend on a team. If a physician wants to kill a patient, what of the rest of the staff? Are they to be made unwilling stooges of the decision of the physician to provide this ‘service’? …
“I once worked in acute care, when observant Catholics (and others with religious objections to abortion) were screened out of the Surgery Suite while abortions were performed. This could never be done in Long Term Care. The facilities could not possibly run with staff opposed to this legalization of murder, as the scheduling of staff around the physicians’ decisions when to give the fatal injections would be impossible.”
As I’ve mentioned before, Christians are under siege throughout the medical professions, and even being a “visible minority woman” will not help if you oppose the Culture of Death. But when they have been driven out, or already where they are missing, the pressure increases on the old, the frail, the disabled, the depressed, the mentally afflicted, the terminally ill — to “do the right thing” and die. “Informal” euthanasia is, as I am vividly aware, well-established in many such institutions, precisely where Christian and other religious influence has disappeared.
It is worse than this, however; for I am also aware that many of the old, having lost control over their own daily lives, live in “paranoid” fear that their attendants are trying to kill them. Every injection, every little wax cup of pills, is a source of terror to them. They trust some staff, do not trust others. Indeed, being a voluble pro-lifer may be the best way to earn their confidence.
Among those still fully witted, but often in pain, the “right to choose” provides a terrible ordeal. Another of my correspondents describes this reality:
“The true horror, besides the actual killing of abortion and euthanasia, is the dreadful ‘option’ it presents to people. Where abortion is illegal, a woman facing an unwanted pregnancy can immediately dismiss killing her baby, and therefore enjoy a certain peace of mind. The decision has been made by external factors. Where killing pre-born babies is legal and paid for by the state, the ‘choice’ is hers, so there is no peace of mind: she vacillates back and forth between her natural motherly instinct, and wanting to get rid of a ‘problem’. She is also faced with immensely increased pressures from parents, boyfriends, &c, urging her on to murder so their own lives can go back to ‘normal’.
“With euthanasia being legal and paid for by the state, the sick person’s mind will be bouncing around like a ping pong ball with the highs and lows of illness. On a bad day he or she will want to ask for suicide, and then on a good day, want to reverse the decision. Obviously, too, there will be a decline in palliative care because it will seem absurd to go to any lengths to ease suffering when a permanent solution is as close as the nearest thanatist killer doctor.”
Here we see in operation a great truth once comprehended not only in church but throughout the Western legal tradition: that “he who deviseth evil soweth discord” (Proverbs 6:14). The “right to choose” evil — death on demand — does not stop at murder. Even among those not murdered, it acts as a tremendous destroyer of souls.