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There was a remarkable exchange in the Palace of Westminster between the chief proponent of the UK’s “assisted dying” (euthanasia to you and me) legislation and one of her opponents. Here it is, albeit with the admittedly partisan commentary of the UK’s right-to-life campaign.
You can ignore that. Just listen to what’s said:
Everything here is perfectly logical, and is not, in fact, shocking at all. If you believe, as Ms. Leadbeater does, that euthanasia is a good thing, then of course doctors should offer it to patients who might be eligible for it. If the parliament has approved the law, and if people in the UK have a right to be injected with a lethal substance to put them to sleep, then it is incumbent upon agents of the state (doctors in this case) to inform people of their rights.
This is the same thing as what the Americans call a Miranda warning: When a policeman arrests you in most western countries, he is obliged to tell you that you have a right to remain silent and that anything you do say, etc, etc – we’ve all watched at least one TV police procedural enough times to recite the warning as rote.
Similarly, when your poor old UK-based nan goes to the doctor with her dodgy hip, the doctor will (in the UK) may be obliged to tell her that she is or might soon be eligible for a peaceful path to eternal slumber. Just as he is obliged to tell her that there’s an eighteen-month waiting list on the NHS for a hip replacement operation. It will be up to her then: Door A, or Door B. Red pill, or Blue.
It is remarkable that any of this is a surprise.
The consequences of it should be obvious and evident to anybody with a brain, but to live in a democracy, as I have written before, is to live in a tyranny of the mindless and the uninformed.
Here’s the beautiful thing about assisted dying, or euthanasia, or whatever you call it: It is relatively simple. If your path to eternity is being administered intravenously, then any competent nurse can do it. When they are executing American prisoners, the chaps that put the IV drips into the veins of the condemned are often not even doctors, but “medical technicians”. Somebody with basic competence of measuring an amount of a drug and finding the right vein can do the job.
The same thing goes for the administration of a gas mask. Or putting somebody in a death pod, or any other of the macabre inventions humanity comes up with for nobbling people with the appearance of compassion and peacefulness. Killing people is not hard. It’s the keeping them alive that costs expertise and money.
All of this is leading to a point, which is this: How long do you think the waiting lists will be for assisted dying? How many times do you think a doctor is ever going to say “sorry I know you want the eternal sleep, but there’s a two-year waiting list for that on the NHS”?
Options and decisions are rarely if ever offered to us in a vacuum. There are pros and cons with both. Medical treatments, especially for advanced ailments like stage four cancer, are arduous, expensive, and unpleasant. Dying and killing is easy and cheap. Throw in painless, there, and this is where the coercion comes in – because doctors will never be offering patients a choice between two roughly equal decisions.
There will be the hard path, and the easy one. And the more people take the easy, painless one, the more that one becomes the responsible one.
We are, as we have noted many times on these pages, living in an era of significant demographic pressure, with fewer births and an aging population. One utter inevitability of that process – something that is irreversible now, even if people started a baby boom today – is that within two to three decades countries like the UK will face a gross demographic imbalance with tens of millions of sick old people being financially supported by many fewer working people.
Now, consider that fact, and ask yourself: How will social attitudes to euthanasia – the cheapest and fastest “treatment option” – change over time?
If you think about it, it is fantastically obvious, and you do not need to apply conspiratorial thinking to arrive at the conclusion. You just need to use logic and deduction.
Of course, if you already support euthanasia as just another “choice”, this all becomes irrelevant. If people have a right to die, then they have a right to die. You will argue that “peer pressure” – which is essentially what the opposition case amounts to – is irrelevant and that people should be trusted to make their own decisions as individuals.
Yet it is a fact of life that individuals are very different. Your correspondent, for example, is stubborn as a mule: An army of doctors and inheritance-hungry relatives could not persuade me to take the lethal injection if I was disinclined to do so, nor could they stop me if I determined that I really wanted it. Others are not like me, happily for the world.
There are simply many of us out there who are deeply influenced by the availability of certain choices and unable to resist them. And do you know who agrees with me about that? Progressives and liberals.
Consider for a moment that these are the people who will tell you on one hand that gambling advertising must be banned because promoting a choice to a person makes them more likely to make that choice. Or consider their views on putting warning labels on cigarettes. Or consider their determination that food labels should come with calory and other warnings.
The only circumstance in which they appear to believe that the law of “promoting an option makes people more likely to take it” does not apply is when it comes to ending your life.
I think they are wrong. And worse than that, I think they are hypocrites.
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