A former advocate of assisted suicide warns of the consequences:
Legalising assisted suicide is a slippery slope toward widespread killing of the sick, MPs and peers were told yesterday. A former euthanasia supporter warned of a surge in deaths if Parliament allowed doctors to give deadly drugs to their patients. ‘Don’t do it Britain,’ said Theo Boer, a veteran European watchdog in assisted suicide cases. ‘Once the genie is out of the bottle, it is not likely ever to go back in again.’
His native Netherlands, where euthanasia has been legal since 2002, has seen deaths double in just six years and this year’s total may reach a record 6,000…. Professor Boer, who is an academic in the field of ethics, had argued seven years ago that a ‘good euthanasia law’ would produce relatively low numbers of deaths. But, speaking in a personal capacity yesterday, he said he now believed that the very existence of a euthanasia law turns assisted suicide from a last resort into a normal procedure. A ‘slippery slope’ for assisted dying in Britain would mean that euthanasia would follow the same path as abortion, which was legalised in 1967. There are now nearly 200,000 terminations a year.
Note that in Holland, “assisted suicide” rapidly transformed into “doctors killing infants”. Assisted suicide is for cowards anyhow; it is only sought by those who don’t have the courage or the decency to kill themselves, but want to offload the moral burden onto someone else. Not that I don’t understand those who don’t wish to suffer through a lingering and painful death. If I ever had a terminal disease, I’d probably want to end it quickly myself, in a room full of my enemies, surrounded by fifty pounds of high explosive.
But I have a simple and just solution. Just make advocating assisted suicide a capital crime punishable by hanging. That way there is no risk of a slippery slope leading to the murder of innocent children and cowards like that old fraud Terry Pratchett will obtain the death at someone else’s hands they are seeking.
Apparently Mr. Hitler just needed better marketing. Had he simply utilized the term “Unterstütztfreitod” instead of “Endlösung” and been careful to get signatures from each individual boarding a train, he would be a modern hero.