Doctors in Britain don’t want legalized euthanasia. Yet they still kill patients.
In other words, why should they want a law defining what it means to kill a patient when they get by with it now without legal interference?
That’s the state of things terminal in Great Britain, according to the age.com.au / Reuters’ Sarah Boseley in London.
Doctors killed 3000 in 2004. These persons were labeled "terminally ill patients."
Now stats show that over 170,000—one third of all deaths—"had treatment withdrawn or withheld, which would have hastened death."
Euthanasia is not legal in Britain. Doctor-assisted suicide likewise.
In other words, doctors do assist ill patients to terminate their lives. They do it one way or another. Why then should doctors be frustrated with the law’s intrusion?
"Deborah Annetts, chief executive of Britain's Voluntary Euthanasia Society, said that ‘this is all done in secret and denied in public. Some of these doctors are acting compassionately on their patients' wishes, but some clearly act without consent. This cannot be safe.’"
Those who defend life in all humans argue that what is going on in Britain is inhumane. Therefore, pro-life efforts continue daily to thwart the killing under doctors’ care. Opening the killing door widens with time if not checked.
Most of the deaths had no permission granted by the patient. Only 0.15 percent of the deaths were "voluntary euthanasia," that is, patients asking doctors to terminate their lives. The rest of the deaths were decided by the doctors.
Of course that is frightening when realizing how a human such as a doctor gets power and then enlarges it. The more it is expanded, the easier it is to expand it further.
Therefore, daily practice of terminating a suffering patient’s life can become so casual as to increase the daily practice.
Anyone dealing with those working at abortion clinics realizes the same occurs there. Those who kill babies finally rationalize the murders are necessary. Therefore, there is no moral nerve acting at all within such killaries. It is daily work, making a living, slicing up infants inside women’s bodies—all of which is legitimate.
For example: There was "the trial of Harold Shipman, who killed hundreds of elderly patients by injecting them with large doses of morphine."
FOOTNOTE: EUTHANASIA WORLDWIDE
Switzerland has allowed assisted suicide since the 1940s, but it was only last month that a hospital allowed the procedure to take place there rather than at the homes of terminally ill patients.
In 2001, the Netherlands was the first country to legalize both patient-assisted suicide and physician-unassisted euthanasia by lethal injection with the patient's consent.
Belgium soon after followed the Netherlands and passed assisted dying laws.
Britain's Parliament is expected to vote this year on an assisted suicide law.
Groups backing assisted suicide exist in countries including India, Zimbabwe, Japan, Australia, Israel and Colombia, according to the World Federation of Right to Die Societies.
A number of countries have jailed doctors or others who have assisted suicides, including Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and Norway, according to Derek Humphry, author of a series of books on euthanasia. Trials have also taken place in Canada, France and Ireland.
The United States' best-known proponent of physician-assisted suicide, Jack Kevorkian, is in prison in Michigan for delivering lethal injections to a terminally ill man in a procedure he videotaped, according to Reuters.
Copyright © 2006 by J. Grant Swank, Jr.
Email: joseph_swank@yahoo.com
