I am on a most interesting e-mail news list that was created by the admirers and students of the world-renowned geneticist, Professor Jerome Lejeune. I had the good fortune of knowing Professor Lejeune and so understand why this newsletter is always so precise and on the cutting edge of science. What else would one expect from Lejeune’s followers?
The newsletter, Genenthique was established by the French Foundation Jerome Lejeune and is one of those e-mail items I have to read every single time it arrives. In the most recent issue a report on euthanasia caught my eye immediately.
While it deals with the situation currently facing the French government, the words and the images it presents could well be describing precisely what is happening in America.
A 2005 French law grants patients the freedom to refuse “any treatment,” including any “artificial treatment” already being received. The writers point out that nearly anytime that tube feeding or tube-provided hydration is withdrawn, the very act of removing it is an act of euthanasia. Yet they tell us that withdrawing nutrition and hydration is part of what the law means by the term “artificial treatment.”
The writers make their point even more shocking by referring to a well known pro-euthanasia advocate, Helga Kuhse, who suggested the very thing that this article addresses when she said:
If we can get people to accept the removal of all treatment and care, especially the removal of food and fluids, they will see what a painful way this is to die, and then, in the patient’s best interest, they will accept the lethal injection.
Kuhse uttered these words in 1984 at a meeting of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies, which means that for the past 24 years those who promote euthanasia have been using the argument to bolster the case that the quicker a “dying” patient can die the better off he will be.
You might think about this and argue, correctly, that in the United States we have not, as yet, legalized lethal injections for the incurably or terminally ill patients. But I would have to remind you that such laws are not beyond imagination.
As Julie Grimstad points out in her article,
Perhaps we are not quite ready to legalize the lethal injection, but can this be far off now that death by dehydration has become a legal “choice” and a common medical practice?
Terri Schiavo’s death was caused by starving her to death and the courts were the entity that approved the death. Her case was preceded by many others and there have been many more since that time. herefore I propose that lethal injection is just a step or two away as proponents of these acts are far more persuasive today than they once were.
Rita Marker and Wesley Smith have been warning of this impending problem for years. In an article entitled “Word, words, words,” they tell the reader,
The first official confirmation of the prevalence of nonvoluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands came on September 10, 1991, when the long-awaited government report, Medical Decisions About the End of Life was released. Popularly known as the Remmelink Report (named after the chairman of the committee that issued it), the study documents the degree to which doctors have taken over the decision making questions of euthanasia.
The findings of the Remmelink Report indicated that, in one year, Dutch physicians deliberately ended the lives of thousands of patients by administering or providing lethal doses or fatal injections.
The United States of America is not the Netherlands, but our fascination with death for the “inconvenient” or “burdensome” individual is no less deadly; we just don’t talk about it much!
Further on in the same article, in fact, Marker and Smith make the cruel pro-euthanasia American agenda obvious:
From l988 through l992, during campaigns to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide in California (1988 and 1992) and in Washington (1991), the phrase of choice among euthanasia proponents was “aid-in-dying.” The words conjured up images of plumping the pillow, wiping the brow and holding the hand of a patient. But these were not the types of aid that would have been legalized. “Aid-in-dying” was defined in the measures’ small print as “aid” that was to be directly and intentionally provided to “end the life” or “terminate the life” of a qualified patient.
Although the exact method for delivering the new death-inducing medical service was not specified, proponents acknowledged that it would probably be accomplished by means of a lethal injection or drug overdose. However, they went to great lengths to conceal this. ‘Try not to go into methods of aid-in-dying such as lethal injections’ was the advice given in a speakers’ packet formulated by the Friends of Initiative 119, an umbrella group for the Washington state measure’s supporters. Instead speakers were advised to say that Initiative 119 was needed to ‘protect our rights as patients.’ Audiences were to be told that the measure was needed to correct flaws that had been discovered by members of the medical community in the state’s outdated Living Will law.
It would be wise for each of us who defend the rights of the innocent and the vulnerable so that their inherent dignity as human persons is recognized and protected in the law to pay close attention to these words.
As I wrote in my blog a few days ago, euthanasia proponents are hard at work in the state of Washington. Just as the fox got into the chicken coup through cunning, so too stealthy harbingers of doom are working their cunning to bring harm to the ill and the disabled.
Whether or not they succeed is up to those of us belonging to the pro-life cause – because without us showing them the truth, voters are likely to cast a “yes” vote that one day may kill them.
