Or…”How to help people die and make it sound good”

This article in the New York Times this week by Jane Brody is just astonishing in its ‘bold frontier’ attitude toward dying. She did an earlier one about making “A Graceful Exit” from life, and claims she received so much mail from folks who want to check out, either themselves or a loved one, that she had to follow up with more direct ‘how to’ information to help them do it. And feel good about it.

Nancy Valko, president of Missouri Nurses for Life and a bioethics expert, forwarded that article to me along with these comments:

This article is basically a list of legal ways to commit euthanasia. While awful, this couldn’t have happened without the destruction of medical ethics and a large part of the population that is apathetic and/or self-involved. We don’t have the right to ask others to kill us and demand legal and public acceptance, if not enthusiasm. But that is not how euthanasia is sold. Instead, euthanasia is sold by taking medical professionals and ethicists without a moral compass and convincing the public that they wouldn’t want to live “like that”, whatever “that” may be.

And, of course, the media has become the major cheerleader for euthanasia enthusiasts who are almost always portrayed as caring individuals with no other agenda than to help people in their death choices.

Media are complicit in the right to die movement that is slowly changing America’s attitudes toward euthanasia by changing the words and the message they have the power to carry by their print and broadcast work. Health care is a moral issue, communications is a moral act, and both professions have plenty of immorality going in their work daily, insidiously.

Assisted suicide by any other name is not medicine, not compassion, and not moral. Wesley J. Smith blogs on it here.