Deadly word games

Manipulating the language to change the meaning of words is insidious. It means that someone is trying to dodge the ramifications of telling the truth clearly. This is one of the biggest subjects I write and talk about often, because it’s the basis of all communications, and determines what we think and how we act. Redefining values turns communication into propaganda.

Here’s yet another example of how the culture of death propagates myths to further its agenda.

The Vermont legislature has fast-tracked a bill to legalize physician-assisted suicide, and California may not be far behind. If the legislatures in these states do vote to redefine physician-assisted suicide as a legitimate and legal “medical treatment,” a large part of the blame, strange though it may sound, can be laid at the feet of postmodernism.

The deconstruction of language, with disregard for facts and accurate definitions, is infecting medical and health-care ethics and policies.

It’s become deadly serious. 

Case in point: In order to further the legitimization of assisted suicide, the American Public Health Association (APHA) embraced the political advocacy of assisted-suicide supporters in November when it decided that “physician-assisted suicide”—an accurate and descriptive term—should be replaced with the euphemistic advocacy-phrase “aid in dying.” At its annual meeting, the organization approved an interim policy:

“Urges health educators, policy-makers, journalists and health care providers to recognize that the choice of a mentally competent, terminally ill person to choose to self-administer medications to bring about a peaceful death is not “suicide,” nor is the prescribing of such medication by a physician “assisted suicide.” Urges terms such as “aid-in-dying” or “patient-directed dying” be used to describe such a choice.”

(More on that here.)

This policy will become permanent if confirmed by the APHA’s governing council in 2007.

These are the consequences for not paying attention, and letting abortion/euthanasia political activists hijack the language and enforce a new ‘ethic’ in traditional health and human services.

The stakes in this semantics game are high. At issue—and indeed, the whole point of this postmodernist exercise—is whether activists will be able to convince other states to join Oregon in redefining the crime of assisted suicide as a legitimate “medical treatment.” If that happens, funding of assisted suicide would soon follow, just as it has in Oregon, where the act of facilitating suicide is now deemed a state-funded form of “comfort care.”

In one sense, the opening of this new front in the assisted-suicide debate reveals that the movement, thought to be unstoppable when Oregon passed the nation’s first assisted-suicide law, understands that it has failed to convince America that suicide should be part of medicine’s armamentarium. In the more than ten years since the passage of the Oregon law, state after state has considered legalizing assisted suicide. Each time, there was early support for the measure. Yet, in each instance, when the official vote was taken, support had evaporated and the proposal went down in defeat.

Take note of that fact. It highlights the power of the people, which is crucial. Abortion/euthanasia activists know they have to turn minds around, so they run disinformation campaigns based on a distorted language.

This left assisted-suicide proponents, particularly Compassion & Choices (C & C) (formerly the Hemlock Society), which spearheaded most of these legislative proposals, searching for some way to improve their position.

They had already tried that by changing their name from the Hemlock Society to ‘Compassion and Choices,’ which sounds ever so much more gentle and caring. Now they had to think up a new strategy.

So C & C commissioned research and polling. They found that people have a negative impression of the term “assisted suicide,” but, if euphemistic slogans like “death with dignity” or “end of life choices” were used to describe the same action, response was relatively positive. Likewise, poll respondents were more apt to approve letting doctors “end a patient’s life” than they were to approve giving doctors the right to “assist the patient to commit suicide.” According to one polling firm, the apparent conflict was a “consequence of mentioning, or not mentioning, the word ‘suicide.’”

It’s that basic. Change the language and you change perceptions.

As a result, assisted-suicide advocates concluded that the accurate word “suicide” had to go. They embarked on a crusade to erase and replace it with kinder, gentler language that masked the harsh reality of what was being discussed.

Perception becomes reality, but the consequences remain the same.

Let’s think about how this works: Take a patient who has been diagnosed with a terminal condition. If that patient asks her doctor for sleeping pills so she can sleep comfortably at night, and if the doctor prescribes them, but she takes all of the pills at once and dies, her death is called “suicide.”

But, if that same patient asks her doctor for sleeping pills so she can die, and if the doctor prescribes them for that purpose, and she takes all of the pills as directed and dies, her death is not called “physician-assisted suicide.”

Assisted-suicide advocates say that that’s proper, but really it’s just political correctness. By bringing postmodernism to health-care public-policy, they hope to drive their agenda to victory.

The clearest term for this agenda is ‘pro-death’, and it will only be stopped by confronting the truth.