Is the assisted-suicide movement winning?

Yes, says expert bioethicist Wesley J. Smith.

The assisted-suicide movement has come a long way in just a couple of decades. Consider, for example, this recent item from the San Francisco Chronicle: “Charlotte Shultz [the wife of former secretary of state George Shultz] accepted the invitation to be honorary co- chair (with Dianne Feinstein) at a Nov. 5 luncheon and program for Compassion & Choices of Northern California…

When members of the social and political elite — people like Senator Feinstein and Mrs. Shultz — associate themselves with assisted-suicide groups as openly as they would with charities like the United Way, we have reached a new cultural moment.

The public face of the movement to market death on demand has changed. It used to be Dr. Kevorkian.

Today, the most important assisted-suicide advocates tend to be affluent and well-tailored liberal women who travel the country pitching “aid in dying” to elite society and the mainstream media.

This is how euthanasia is being mainstreamed.

Three states have legalized assisted suicide — Oregon and Washington by voter referendum, and Montana by a court ruling. States from Hawaii to Vermont have experienced protracted legislative battles over the issue, the tide in favor of assisted suicide rising incrementally with each failed attempt.

These advances would not have happened but for a powerful myth promoted by assisted-suicide advocates and helped along by a compliant media: the notion that Oregon’s experiment with legalized assisted suicide has been a success, in which problems and abuses are rare or nonexistent.

Not true. It’s just not being reported truthfully.

Meanwhile, euthanasia is spreading by the tortured logic of its advocates.

On Dec. 5, 2008, district judge Dorothy McCarter ruled in Baxter v. Montana that the state law banning assisted suicide violates the right to privacy guaranteed in the Montana constitution, as well as that document’s declaration that “the dignity of the human being is inviolable.” McCarter found therein a “fundamental right” for the terminally ill to “die with dignity”: perhaps the first time an advocacy slogan became the basis for a constitutional right.

That’s an important point to make. It’s emblematic.

McCarter also ruled that doctors have a concomitant right to be free from “liability under the State’s homicide statutes” if they assist a patient’s suicide.

Just change words around to mean something new, and convince people by using this ‘newspeak’.

Wesley has the best account of this movement and its trajectory I’ve seen yet. He concludes….

…euthanasia advocates are passionately committed, work hard, and feel that time is on their side. Are their opponents equally committed?

While euthanasia is becoming more of an option, complacency about it is not.