Taking on the Culture of Death

Fire of Liberty

Over at First Things' blog On the Square, Joseph Bottom has a good post that notes that the whole subject of Euthanasia seems to be resurfacing within the national conversation of late with the continued drip, drip, drip of news stories of this vile act. As an individual who is physically disabled due to the degenerative nature of Muscular Dystrophy, I'm one who will jump up and down (well you get the point) to keep doctors or others from ending the life of folks because they see themselves and others a unfit to live, a burden, don't like their cleft palette (Look at the UK), claim they're just a "vegetable" or some other reason that seems to come right out of one of those late 19th, early 20th century eugenics book. Though my argument on this terrible "death culture" might seem simplistic or too emotional but it is a voice of many who feel that life is such a precious thing and shouldn't be sullied by folks who are so quick to prescribe or advocate a position of snuffing out a life. I'd have to say that Bottom puts the whole issue and the ever growing euthanasia movement (luckily there's anti groups as well) in greater detail with the following comments:

In the years since, it'’s risen and fallen, though even in the case of Terri Schiavo, never quite attaining the public visibility it reached in 1997. Maybe some reaction against the attempt to save Schiavo was inevitable, but if you watch as the news cycles roll past, you can see it building again here and there.

Wesley J. Smith has been relentlessly collecting these stories, and you can discern their pattern on his blog, Secondhand Smoke. Much of the latest news comes from Europe: Doctors in England want to terminate a child with spinal muscular atrophy, despite the parents'’ desire to care for him, while Holland has recently begun to allow euthanizing of babies, and euthanasia deaths are on a rapid rise in Belgium.

But here and there, you can feel euthanasia sliding back into public debate here in the United States, as well. When, in January, the Supreme Court ruled against federal sanctions against doctors in Oregon'’s euthanasia program, the media reports generally signaled that the issue would be coming back. The American Medical Association'’s latest "“Declaration of Professional Responsibility"” has replaced crucial protections and made easy a doctor'’s participation in euthanasia.

At some point in the next few years, I expect, we will see another solid, national push for legalized euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Some poster child will be selected——a sort of counter-Terri Schiavo——and the better-off-dead crowd will get into full swing. I don't think it will come quite as close to success as it came in 1997, but it may. Still, the Supreme Court'’s refusal to establish a right to euthanasia in Washington v. Gluckberg leaves the matter in the political realm, where the tides really do rise and fall.

There'’s a model here for what might have happened with abortion. I wonder how far the abortion advocates would have advanced, beyond the point where euthanasia is now, if Roe had not been imposed on the nation.

Now its very scary that folks would get up in the morning to support something the Nazis used throughout their tenure in Germany but thankfully you have folks like Joseph Bottom, Wesley J. Smith, and Ramesh Ponurru out there battling against this culture of death. As for me I'll continue to man my post in this fight and remind folks they should hold back on complaining about how tough their life or the life of their family member because all they have to do is look at someone else around the corner or in the next town whose life is much more diffucult and be lucky they're alive. You just have to play with the hand you're dealt.