Nitschke’s troubling trail of death
When my mother was just days from dying of cancer, I finally agreed to ask a doctor for help so she could kill herself.
Few people could have been more in favour of euthanasia than was I.
My only regret back then was that mum’s brave attempt failed, and she took more than another week to die.
Decades later, I’ve changed my mind completely. Legalised euthanasia now horrifies me, and not just because I learned much in mum’s last days.
In fact, what most influenced me far more has been—ironically—Philip Nitschke, founder of Exit International.
It’s Australia’s most famous lobbyist for euthanasia who has best shown me how dangerous it can be and what evil might be unleashed in legalising it.
I saw how he started by helping people to die who were not in pain or dying. I saw him move on to helping people to die who were not even sick.
And on Monday I saw him boast on the ABC’s Australian Story how he’d now helped two women to kill a man so raddled with Alzheimer’s that he literally did not know what day it was.
Here we see the slippery slide that is inevitable when you remove the taboo against murder and suicide. What then stops anyone from killing themselves? Or, soon, from killing others?
Let me trace, body by body, Nitschke’s own slide, from the people he helped to die in 1996, when the Northern Territory briefly had laws permitting euthanasia.
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Scarey.
ReplyDeleteIt's a classic proof of the "slippery slope" argument. You start offering euthanasia to people in pain, then it becomes terminal illness, then before long you are killing people and it's not murder. In this case it was Alzheimer's but in other places it was autism and mental/ developmental handicaps, or being Jewish.It is indeed scary.
ReplyDeleteIt's so sad that we have lost all historical perspective (not to mention sense of right and wrong) and seem condemned to repeat the evils of history that a previous generation said "Never again."
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely.I talked to a German man many years ago in the grocery store, he was saying that prior to WWII, abortion became acceptable in Germany, then late term abortion, then if a child had a severe problem he or she could be killed at birth. He said it went on and on like this and by the time the holocast happened, people were so desensitized that they didn't feel the horror that they may have otherwise which is why he felt it was allowed to happen.
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