Assisted suicide advocacy rests on two fundamental ideological premises. First, that we own our bodies and hence, it is the “ultimate civil liberty” to decide on the time, manner, and place of our own demise. Second, that killing is an acceptable answer to the problem of human suffering. Once these values are accepted, limiting assisted suicide to the terminally ill becomes logically unsustainable.
The death on demand agenda, usually kept opaque for political reasons, is now being openly voiced by Ludwig Minelli, the head of one of Switzerland’s infamous suicide clinics. Apparently, the healthy wife of a terminally ill, suicidal husband, wants to die alongside him via assisted suicide. From the story :
The founder of the Swiss assisted-suicide clinic Dignitas revealed plans today to help a healthy wife die alongside her terminally ill husband. Ludwig Minelli described suicide as a “marvelous opportunity” that should not be restricted to the terminally ill or people with severe disabilities . . . He said that he expected to go to the Swiss courts to seek a ruling in the controversial case of a Canadian couple who have asked to die together. “The husband is ill, his partner is not ill but she told us here in my living room that, ‘If my husband goes, I would go at the same time with him’,” he said.
It is worth mentioning here that Minelli’s group already won a ruling from the Swiss Supreme Court declaring a constitutional right to assisted suicide for the mentally ill.
Back to the story:
Mr. Minelli, a human rights lawyer, tells The Report on BBC Radio 4 tonight that the British had an “obsession” with the requirement to be terminally ill. “It is not a condition to have a terminal illness,” he said. “Terminal illness is a British obsession.
Actually, it is a political tactic, also employed here in the U.S., to get people accustomed to the idea of suicide as a human right.
Death on demand for anyone with a non-transitory desire to die is the inevitable outcome of assisted suicide advocacy given its ideological premises. So let’s—finally—have an honest debate about this issue. As Lincoln said about America being unable to remain half slave and half free because it would eventually become all one or the other; so too, assisted suicide.
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