What we believe about ending life
Here is a clear, straight-line summary of how a society built on the Judeo-Christian ethic has come to accept the means and decisions to end human life willfully. It cites the actual teaching of the Church, and recounts the history of how we got from that belief to the current culture in which death is a choice. It’s brief and compelling, a must-read for everyone because it could threaten anyone.
Contrary to a popular myth, the Living Will did not spring from a patient’s rights movement fed up with over-zealous and unwanted treatment being “forced” on terminally ill patients. Rather, the Living Will was invented by the “right to die” movement as a step toward legalization of euthanasia. Few people are aware of this fact. Yet knowing the history of the movement to legalize euthanasia (and assisted suicide) is essential to understanding and combating the Culture of Death.
The Euthanasia Society of America (ESA) was founded in New York in 1938. Its goal was to gain social and legal acceptance for the “right” to kill vulnerable human beings (people the organization called “mental defectives” and “incurables”). In 1939, ESA proposed legislation for “voluntary” euthanasia. According to its treasurer, attorney Charles Nixdorff, ESA “hoped eventually to legalize the putting to death of ‘non-volunteers’ beyond the help of medical science.” In a pamphlet entitled Merciful Release, ESA explained its strategy: “The public is readier to recognize the right to die than the right to kill, even though the latter be in mercy.” ESA miscalculated—the public was not ready for either.
It required considerable semantic engineering – a calculated manipulation of the language – to sell unethical and detestable ideas to the public.
After numerous failed attempts to legalize euthanasia, ESA leaders realized that, to be successful, they first had to change both medical ethics and public morals. Thus, in 1967, ESA established the Euthanasia Educational Council (EEC) which launched a massive education campaign and introduced the Living Will as a tool to promote discussion of the “right to die.”
The author of EEC’s Living Will, attorney Luis Kutner, expressed concern about medicine’s increasing ability to prolong life in “a state of indefinite vegetated animation.” Such dehumanizing language was accompanied by outrageous claims that modern medicine was torturing terminally ill patients and stripping them of every shred of dignity by prolonging their lives. The “right to die” movement’s educational strategy was twofold: first, prey on people’s fears in order to convince them that they wouldn’t want to live like that; next, introduce the Living Will as a way for people to die on their own terms.
Look how well it has worked. I know I’m seeing a huge increase in news stories in the bioethics newslist I receive regularly of activists trying to change laws across the states to allow people to choose death, and further…to require faith-based health care providers to enable or even assist in these suicides. And then there’s the issue of rationing health care to the more ‘promising’ patients and denying it to the weakest and most vulnerable, once again convincing families that ‘that’s what’s best’ for the patient when it’s actually expedient for the medical provider.
In 1989, John Cardinal O’Connor, Archbishop of New York, predicted: “The “right to die”—which really means that hospitals and doctors and other health care ‘providers’ will be required to kill—will dwarf the abortion phenomenon in magnitude, in numbers, in horror…”Right to die” laws will one day force a patient to prove that he or she has a right to live, just as we are now forced to prove that the unborn child has a right to live.”
The Living Will was not only deceptively promoted, it was deceptively named. It has nothing to do with living.
Good people are always asking ‘what can I do?’ on these grave moral issues that seem overwhelming. Pass on that link up above to this outstanding and incisive analysis to others. Be aware of the deceptions. Stay informed.
