Euthanasia is a growing problem throughout the Western world. I would guess that this is due in large part to the overall decline in respect for human life. We no longer see a human being as uniquely valuable in and of themselves. We do not grant anyone an intrinsic right to life.
We opened the doorway to legalized killing when we decided that all people may be killed without compunction before they are born. By granting one simple “choice” to kill their own child to women, we swept away all our responsibilities to address the violence and misogyny that made abortion seem necessary.
Abortion made killing those who are inconvenient, or whose lives forced us into a moral conundrum, an acceptable “solution.” We killed the unborn rather than give up our misogynist ways. We turned the noble cause of human rights on its head and claimed that the legal freedom to kill the most helpless humans was a basic human right. We discarded 2,000 years of Christian teaching and proclaimed that abortion was actually a moral option.
It was a short step from there to deciding that illness and suffering needed a quick and “merciful” end. Rather than use the pain medications we have and care for those who are elderly or infirm, we quickly moved to the argument that killing them was the “moral” and “humane” thing to do. First we called it “mercy killing.” When that gentle phrase became tainted, the advertising folks supplied a new one. Today we call it “death with dignity.”
Somewhere along the line, we lost the understanding of just how dangerous a doctor who no longer feels a responsibility to be a healer can be. Doctors are rapidly becoming the new executioner class of our society.
Abortion, euthanasia, much medical research, are all killers. They kill people. These changes in our legal structure that the nihilists among us keep pushing are metamorphosing a medical license from a license to heal into a license to kill.
We have trusted our doctors so completely for so long that I think a lot of us can not fathom the sheer killing power of modern medicine. If these drugs, devices and treatments we trust doctors to wield in good faith fall into the hands of a medical profession that has been cut lose from any legal responsibility to act in their patients’ best interest, what fate awaits us all?
I remember back when abortion was first legalized, pro life people said it would lead to euthanasia. I thought they were nuts. I thought they would say anything to make their point. They talked about the dangers of cloning, the destruction of the family, the eventual rise of euthanasia and the concept of human beings as disposable.
And I thought they were nuts.
I can tell you now, I was the one who was nuts.
They were right. They were absolutely, dead-on accurate in their predictions of where this new power to define a group of people as having no right to life would lead us. They understood it, but no one, including me, would listen to them. They were the cranks. The religious nuts. The woman haters.
I used to rant about fanatics who thought that a fertilized egg should have more rights than a 14-year-old girl. I was furious about this. I mean irate.
God changed me. Changing me wasn’t easy, not even for Him. I fought Him hard on this. I argued. I debated. I prayed. I hid from it. I fought because my feelings about women’s rights, in particular as they pertain to violence against women, are so strong that they cut right through me.
These feelings are so strong that I fought God rather than just obey Him. But love is patient and it is kind. Rather than bring down lightning bolts on my stubborn head, He just kept showing me I was wrong. It took a while, but He got through to me. And now, I’m trying to get through to other people.
Killing is never the answer to anything. All human life matters. Every single human being has an intrinsic value and right to life and we may not tamper with it. That is the order of things. The first premise. We must, as Christians, reason our actions from there.
Largely because of women like me, abortion as a legal right prevailed back in that day. It is holding on strong now. But the predictions of the pro life people are all coming true alongside it.
Abortion is just the smallest part of the burgeoning culture of death that surrounds us today. Sadly, most of it has its beginnings in our medical research facilities and our institutions of medical care. Euthanasia is legalized medical murder. It moves the death dealing from the unborn, who we cannot see and can allow ourselves to think is not real, to the sick, the infirm and the elderly. Euthanasia is the legal power to kill the men and women who are entrusted to our care by virtue of their various weaknesses.
You cannot deny the reality of the life you are taking with euthanasia. There is no “it’s just tissue/it can’t feel pain” wiggle room here. This is cold-blooded, face-to-face, undeniable murder of a human being by medical means.
Euthanasia turns your doctor into your executioner. It our responsibility as Christians to oppose it absolutely.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In