Be afraid. be very afraid

Wesley Smith reports that a poll in pro Euthanasia Canada (Quebec) says 91 percent of caregivers want to be able to kill people with dementia, even against their wishes.

This doesn't surprise me.


In the early 1990's, our Family practice journal printed a pro euthanasia article, where "assisted suicide" author actually started his article with an anecdote where a stressed out caretaker and the doctor discussed too bad they couldn't kill her. Uh, demented people can't commit suicide. They are incompetent. But never mind. Ah, but the guy was pro euthanasia but managed to hide his agenda behind a subtle wall of "I ony want to discuss both sides of this" meme.

Yeah. Let's discuss both sides of Hitler's T4 program, which saved money wasted on caring for the mentally ill and retarded, and as a bonus, it freed medical personnel to help the war effort.

And of course, deny that this would lead to a slippery slope when the line moved from killing dying Typhus patients in concentration camps to just killing anyone with genetic inferiority: mainly Jews, and Gypsies,

But never mind. We (two professors and myself) protested and managed to get a nice nuanced article published about the problem..

(we had less luck with Cardinal Law, whose minions probably kept the letter from his eyes, and finally we were told they would have their own expert write on it...a wishy wash "MEGO" article full of mush that didn't really explain what was going on,  in the diocesan paper, but that's another story).

After our article was published in the medical journal, one of my "partners in crime" got a letter from a nursing home doc discussing which of his patient he would kill once killing was made legal.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Any doc worth his or her salt can kill and get away with it.. and the bad news is that some of them can and will do this.

and the line between refusing extraordinary care and treatment of severe pain with high doses or narcotics that could shorten your life (both of which are okay in Catholic ethics) is a fine line.

but that's another long essay...