The Suicide Tar Pit

“Legalizing doctor-prescribed death is mostly a cause of the well off,  for whom access to quality health care is not a problem,” writes my friend Wesley Smith in National Review Online.

To be blunt, these folks know what they want for themselves and don’t care who else gets hurt. But for the destitute, the elderly, people with disabilities – the multitude who can’t access quality care – it is a tar pit. That is why advocates for the poor, disability rights activists, and civil rights groups like LULAC oppose legalizing assisted suicide.

By “tar pit” he means that once in, the victims can’t get out and then they die, and that people will want to throw them in because not throwing them in will cost more money. As he notes, “in Oregon poor people have been refused life-extending chemotherapy under health care rationing — but offered payment for assisted suicide by the state.”

He’s particularly vexed because the South African Anglican leader Desmond Tutu now favors assisted suicide for a land of people who would be the victims of such policies. “The people,” Wesley notes, “are not in the streets demanding the right to be killed by a doctor. They want ready access to a doctor! They want decent medical care.”