“Creeping Death” might sound like an old Hammer horror movie, but the reality is closer to the 1976 science fiction film, Logan’s Run. Although (often justly) dismissed as a plodding and pretentious, the film’s central premise is beginning to look grimly familiar: in the name of sustainability, everyone in the future is forcibly euthanased at the age of 21.
Well, okay, we’re not (quite) there yet, but, given the rise of youth-obsessed, misanthrope eco-fanatics like Extinction Rebellion, it doesn’t seem all that outlandish, either. Especially not when Western societies are rushing to embrace a genuine culture of death.
As always, “progressive” activists solemnly swear that there’s no danger slippery slope from euthanasia laws. But then, that’s what they always say. As always, reality shows otherwise.
Doctors, church leaders and MPs across the political divide have sounded the alarm on the “creeping” expansion of voluntary euthanasia, warning that key safeguards in the benchmark Victorian law have been stripped out of proposed legislation in other states.
The Australian Medical Association warned that the very fact that the Victorian legislation had to be hedged with so many safeguards in the first place demonstrated the inherent risk of state-sanctioned killing. Yet, as has happened almost everywhere such legislation has been passed, even those safeguards are ripped away with indecent haste. Once the Rubicon has been crossed, all bets are off.
“There is serious concern about this slippage,” the chair of the Australian Medical Association’s ethics and medico legal committee, Chris Moye, told The Weekend Australian, voicing concerns about the West Australian legislation, while further changes are being proposed in Queensland. Dr Moye warned that protections in the Victorian law had been cut from the WA bill, which also allows doctors to raise a discussion of euthanasia.
“A lot of this (change) was happening even before the Victorian law, which is only two months old, has actually been tested,” Dr Moye said. “At this point, we haven’t seen how assisted dying works in Victoria and yet the slippage is happening across these various jurisdictions. I think there are two reasons: people were always going to be looking at it (the Victorian law) and the tendency always is to relax legislation.”
[…] Under the reform, backed by Daniel Andrews’s Labor government as “minimalist”, eligibility is restricted to dying adults assessed as having fewer than six months to live or a year in the case of sufferers of a neurodegenerative disease. They must be experiencing intolerable levels of pain and suffering and have been resident in Victoria for 12 months before making the first formal request to die. Doctors are not allowed to raise the option of assisted death with eligible patients.
The proposed WA law reverses this, allowing doctors to instigate a discussion on voluntary assisted dying. The Victorian requirement for one of the two doctors who independently assess a patient’s eligibility to be a specialist is waived, as is the need for a government permit to allow the lethal medication to be dispensed […] A draft bill circulated in Queensland by two former members of the state’s law reform commission, Ben White and Lindy Willmott of Queensland University of Technology, scraps the time requirement on life expectancy.
theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/safeguards-lost-states-accused-of-death-creep
This should come as a surprise to absolutely no one. “Imminently terminal illness and intolerable suffering” quickly becomes “terminal illness”, becomes “mental suffering”, becomes “on request, at any time”. Age limits are progressively eroded until nine year-olds are being killed by the state.
At the same time, abortion enthusiasts are pushing the envelope for killing the unborn ever-later. Eventually, no doubt, the two will meet. Finally, we will have arrived at some kind of progressive utopia where it becomes legal for the state to murder anyone, at any time.
As Australian rock band This Is Serious Mum once said, “Kill yourself now and avoid the rush”.