National Review
Reproduced with permission
Wesley J. Smith*
Assisted-suicide advocates pretend they want assisted suicide limited to the terminally ill.
They pretend that they favor strict guidelines.
And they pretend they would never want doctors forced to participate in intentionally ending the life of a patient. Indeed, the laws they have passed all contain conscience protections.
Except, sometimes they show their true hands. For example, when the Canadian Supreme Court imposed a broad right to lethal-injection euthanasia — certainly not limited to the dying — Compassion and Choices (formerly the Hemlock Society) issued a laudatory press release — later scrubbed because it told the truth about the movement’s true goals.
And now, Compassion and Choices — again, which has included conscience protections in laws it sponsored as a necessary predicate to passage — has come out strongly against a proposed Trump-administration office in HHS to protect medical professionals from forced participation in procedures against their consciences and/or religious beliefs. From an email sent to its supporters (my emphasis):
The new division marks one of the greatest threats we’re facing to the future of the end-of-life choice movement and patient-centered care.
Under the HHS proposed rules, providers who object to various procedures could impose their own religious beliefs on their patients by withholding vital information about treatment options from them — including options such as voluntarily stopping eating and drinking, palliative sedation or medical aid in dying. And your federal tax dollars will be used to protect physicians who make the unconscionable decision to willfully hold back information from a patient and abandon them when they are at their most vulnerable.
This is unacceptable and needs to be stopped.
Note the warning that conscience protections threaten “the future” of the assisted-suicide movement. It is abundantly clear that these suicide advocates believe forcing doctors to participate in suicide is essential to implementing their lethal agenda.
C & C already tried to impose such a duty on doctors in Vermont in support of a regulation that sought to force doctors to share information on assisted suicide with patients. That violated the assisted-suicide law’s conscience protections. Dissenting doctors sued and forced the bureaucrats to retreat. C & C tried to intervene legally to (unsuccessfully) thwart that settlement.
So, this is the truth: If C & C prevails in legalizing assisted suicide (and eventually, euthanasia) across the country, pressure will soon begin to force dissenting MDs, nurses, and pharmacists to either get on the death train or get out of medicine.
For those with eyes to see, let them see.
Accessed 2018-03-28