Death Cult Rationales

     If you spend enough time researching a horror, it transforms into something else… something more like a living thing than an evil deed or practice. It acquires a personality of its own. In your times spent delving into it, you can hear it whispering to you. Now and then, I’ve felt a temptation to whisper back.

     It’s not a good feeling, Gentle Reader.

     Among the notions Pascal and I have included in our surveys of today’s death cults is the specific practice called euthanasia: the legal ending of one person’s life by another. The proponents of euthanasia can be quite passionate about it. One or two of them have made careers out of their advocacy.

     The original rationale advanced for legalizing euthanasia was intolerable and incurable suffering. Why, the proponents asked, should anyone whose “quality of life” is so low be required to continue to live, if only to suffer unendingly? And if it’s his right to live no more, shouldn’t others – medical professionals – be allowed to help him to quietus painlessly?

     That was the entering wedge. Things have gone well beyond that argument since the famous 1939 manslaughter trial of Louis Greenfield. As euthanasia has been legalized in various nations and several states, the developments that have followed have illuminated an aspect of contemporary society that would make any decent person oscillate between rage and terror.

     Death is increasingly being treated as medical care:

     Amid ongoing efforts to expand euthanasia in Canada under the name of “medical aid in dying” (MAID), one Ottawa man says he has been offered euthanasia “multiple times” as he struggles with lifelong disabilities and chronic pain from a disease called cerebellar ataxia.
     Roger Foley, 49, shared some of his story in a recent video interview with Amanda Achtman of the Dying to Meet You project, which was created to “humanize our conversation on suffering, death, meaning, and hope.” The project seeks to “[restore] our cultural health when it comes to our experiences of death and dying” through speaking engagements and video campaigns.

     Roger Foley wants to live. Yes, his life is difficult, but despite occasional temptations he doesn’t want it ended. But Canadian medical services have urged “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD) several times:

     “One time, [a nurse] asked me, ‘Do you have any thoughts of self-harm?’ I’m honest with him and tell him I do think about ending my life because of what I’m going through, being prevented from the resources that I need to live safely back at home.”
     “From out of nowhere, he just pulls out, ‘Well, if you don’t get self-directed funding, you can always apply for an assisted.’”
     Foley said the offers from doctors to help end his life have “completely traumatized me.”
     “Now it’s this overlying option where in my situation, when I say I’m suicidal, I’m met with, ‘Well, the hospital has a program to help you with that if you want to end your life.’”

     Read the above carefully, Gentle Reader. Remember Canada’s version of socialized medicine: all medical care is paid for by the government, and the government decides what it’s willing to pay for. Roger Foley has applied several times for “self-directed funding” that would permit him in-home assistance to continue living. It’s always been declined.

     This is terrible enough, but recent developments have made it look even worse:

     Canadian doctors, having accepted the country’s assisted-suicide regime, are now considering whether to harvest organs from euthanasia patients before they have died, The Federalist reported Wednesday.
     The doctors reason thus: Organs are normally removed from a donor as soon as possible after death to ensure they are in the best possible condition for transplant. If organs were removed from a live person, they would be in even better condition. And if that patient is about to die voluntarily anyway, what’s the harm in killing him by taking his organs?
     “The best use of my organs, if I’m going to receive a medically assisted death, might be to not first kill me and then retrieve my organs, but to have my mode of death — as we medically consider death now — to be to retrieve my organs,” said Rob Sibbald, an ethicist at Ontario’s London Health Sciences Centre.
     Sibbald made those remarks at a conference in 2018, just two years after Canada’s assisted-suicide law, known as medical assistance in dying (MAiD), was passed. According to The Federalist’s Logan Washburn, the event was sponsored by three organizations who are so intent on increasing organ donations that they were, apparently, willing to entertain the notion of euthanizing a patient by removing his organs.

     What seamless logic! What economy! “He’s gonna die anyway, so let’s salvage what we can use from him without letting it decay! We can keep other people alive and keep costs down at the same time!”

     But there are a few Canadians with darker thoughts on the subject:

     “MAiD is a huge money-making business — now they’re saving money on future healthcare,” Heather Hancock, a disabled Canadian who said she was pressured to let doctors kill her, told Washburn. “They’re literally denying us healthcare treatment and offering us MAiD instead.”
     Angelina Ireland, whom Washburn described as “executive director of the Delta Hospice Society, an end-of-life care facility that the Canadian government shut down and then took over for not terminating its patients,” told him, “You can get big, big money on the world market” for human organs. “We have opened ourselves to some horrific stuff.”

     Yes, Roger Foley is one of them:

     Canada is the top country for organ donations via euthanasia. Still, its national health system had an organ shortage in December 2022, with more than 3,700 patients awaiting a transplant. Health officials could be trying to close gaps like these by killing patients to harvest their organs, anti-euthanasia advocates told The Federalist.
     Disabled whistleblower Roger Foley, who says he has been pressured to accept euthanasia four times, told The Federalist Sibbald’s speech appears to suggest doctors might harvest organs from live patients.
     “His statement is like, ‘We’ll just do it anyway, we’ll let the physicians do it. And after they start doing it, if there’s ever a complaint, then it will go to the courts, and then the courts can decide if this is right or wrong,’” Foley said. “It could be they’re already doing euthanasia by organ harvesting, we just don’t know about it.”
     He called MAID a “sliding practice” due to “ableism and disdain for persons with disabilities and the vulnerable.”

     If there are any advocates for the legalization of euthanasia reading this piece, make no sudden moves and keep your hands where I can see them.