Every time a government wants to pass state-sanctioned suicide laws, we’re treated to the same oily palaver that there’s no ‘slippery slope’. Except that, every time, there is.
In fact, the latest jurisdiction to attempt to push through “Voluntary Assisted Dying” (suicide, to put it bluntly), the Australian Capital Territory, isn’t even waiting for the first laws to pass before shoving off down the slippery slope. They’re already talking about lowering the minimum age to include children.
Canada, where even poverty is being mooted as a justification for putting down unwanted humans, is something of a sinister poster child against “euthanasia”.
But if we really want to get an idea of what’s waiting just a few years down the suicide track, it’s hard to go past the Netherlands.
Several Dutch citizens who had autism or other intellectual disabilities have died by physician-assisted suicide in recent years after doctors determined their afflictions were untreatable obstacles to a normal life, researchers found.
Remember when they assured us that it was only ever about intolerable suffering and imminent death?
Now, we’re careening off into full “Final Solution” territory.
Nearly 40 people who identified as autistic or intellectually disabled were legally euthanized in the Netherlands between 2012 and 2021, according to a Kingston University investigation of Dutch euthanasia cases.
While remaining mindful of Godwin’s Law, it’s still hard to suppress a shiver when you recall that the “Aktion T-4”, the first step into outright murder for the Third Reich, targeted the mentally and physically disabled. Even more so, when Nazi authorities justified the killing as of those “deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination”.
Five people younger than 30 who were killed at their own request cited autism as the sole or a major reason for their decision to end their lives, the UK study found.
With those cases, experts have questioned whether the law allowing doctors to kill suicidal patients via lethal injections has strayed too far from its initial intentions when passed in 2002.
It was always the intention. They’ve just stopped pretending otherwise.
Kasper Raus, an ethicist and public health professor at Belgium’s Ghent University, said the types of patients seeking out physician-assisted suicide have changed greatly over the past two decades in both the Netherlands and Belgium, where it is also legal.
When the Netherlands became the first country to legalize human euthanasia, the debate focused on people with cancer – not those with autism, Raus said.
That’s the motte: the easy-to-defend, moralising lie. The bailey, the harder-to-defend real objective, is something far, far darker.
In the roughly 10-year period the study focused on, nearly 60,000 people decided to die via euthanasia in the Netherlands, according to the Dutch government’s euthanasia review committee. Of those deaths, the committee has released documents and data on 900 cases in an effort of transparency […]
Many of the patients cited a number of mental, physical and age-related ailments as the reason for ending their lives – including unbearable loneliness.
Eight people, however, named the sole cause of their suffering as factors related to their intellectual disability – such as social isolation, a lack of coping strategies, an inability to adjust to change or oversensitivity to stimuli.
One of the report’s main authors Irene Tuffrey-Wijne, a palliative care specialist at Kingston University, questioned the ethics of ending the lives of the autistic.
“There’s no doubt in my mind these people were suffering,” she said. “But is society really OK with sending this message, that there’s no other way to help them and it’s just better to be dead?”
More to the point, if people really are so profoundly disabled that they are unable to live a so-called meaningful life, are they really in a position to make the decision to end their lives?
The director of Cambridge University’s Autism Research Centre, Simon Baron-Cohen, worried that people with such disabilities may not fully grasp the decision to end their lives. He called it “abhorrent” that they were not offered more support and were instead euthanized.
MSN
Well, can’t have them being a “burden on society”, now, can we?
Instead, we’re expected to live with absurd contradiction that, if someone is depressed and throws themselves in front of a train, it’s a terrible tragedy.
But if they get a doctor to sign off and inject them with lethal chemicals, it’s beautiful, kind and peaceful.