For those who pooh-pooh arguments about slippery slopes (see "medical" marijuana, abortion-on-demand), we give them Belgium, a country that allows the killing of people for psychiatric reasons. Oops, we mean euthanasia. Vocabulary can be all in these matters.
The people of Belgium, a liberal democracy of the first order, legalized euthanasia in 2002 for those in comas or living with a painful disease. But also for mental disorders. Belgium is one of two countries to allow such. The Netherlands being the other.
Now a handful of doctors in Belgium are under investigation for euthanizing a woman with autism.
The case involves 38-year-old Tine Nys and three of her doctors in East Flanders. She had been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome two months before she was killed. Er, euthanized.
Apparently she had lived 37-plus years before her diagnosis. Two months after that opinion, she asked to die, and a doctor poisoned her. That's not hyperbole. The actual charge against the doctors, as expressed by Belgium officials, is suspicion of poisoning.
Tine Nys' family was bold enough to complain.
They tell the papers that the doctor in charge, Lieve Thienpont, only had two or three interviews with the woman/victim/patient, and in the end fumbled around when administering the fatal drugs.
According to the various reports, many experts--and not just outside Belgium--say that autism isn't a reason for a body to be a "candidate" for euthanasia. As if he were running for high office. But give some doctors a diagnosis and two months, and they will do harm.
The argument for euthanasia in these cases, such that it is, is that those with mental illnesses should be allowed the same rights as those with physical ailments. Sort of a bill of rights for the death culture. But are those with mental illness always able to make the right decisions when it comes to their lives? Do they have the mental capacity to make such life-and-death decisions while on their medications--or only when off? Because mental illness is a hidden illness, and a doctor can't see damage on a brain scan, where does manslaughter end and a dignified death begin?
Even in Belgium, this case is raising more questions than answers.
Will euthanasia become just another choice? It's not permitted in the United States, yet. Several states do allow physician-assisted suicide, but those patients must be terminally ill with some sort of physical disease. Euthanasia for autism, or intellectual disability, or psychotic disorders isn't allowed on these shores. But that doesn't mean there aren't Right to Die outfits blistering the landscape. They have their own ideas and priorities. And once we go down the slippery slope, it will be hard to claw back to dignity. In fact, we'd say that some states are looking up from that slippery slope. Certainly some nations.
We are reminded of something that Tony Snow once wrote in a column. Tony was not only a good person and family man, but a member of the media. He might have been Fox News' first star. He was a syndicated columnist as well. While being treated for cancer, a disease that eventually took him, he wrote this, back in 2006, about the euthanasia and Right to Die movements:
"These 'rights' are forced upon the helpless, not exercised for their benefit or protection. They express fashionable society's revulsion of imperfection and pain--its view that it's better to die than to suffer, better to expire than linger as a shell of one's former self. Modern Americans seem absurdly determined to wipe away all evidence of what previous generations understood and accepted about life--its pains, challenges, surprises; its miraculous beginnings and eventual endings. The fear of hardship has created a cult of death."
The boundaries of that cult of death keep expanding. Those of us who worry about such things should remember, even as our oh-so-sophisticated betters explain why the least of these can be shuffled off this mortal coil with the help of a needle, and that the depressed and mentally retarded and maybe those suffering from mood disorders and anxieties should be able to die with their rights on:
Choose life. For there's no coming back from erring on the side of death.
Editorial on 11/30/2018