Why euthanasia should be illegal and why you should oppose it
September 5, 2024 by Doctor Vernon Coleman
The following essay is taken, with permission, from Jack King’s book `Why they want to kill us.’ With thanks to Dr King. No one in politics or the media will debate euthanasia. As with covid, the truth is being suppressed. No one else will publish the arguments outlined in Dr King’s book.
1) There is no known way of killing people in a peaceful, painless and dignified way.
2) In whichever country a law is passed legalising euthanasia, the parameters are likely to be extended quite soon afterwards. So, for example, if a law is passed legalising the killing of patients at the very end of their lives, the law will be extended to cover patients who are not terminally ill. And then the law will be extended to cover the mentally ill and to include children.
3) There is evidence that patients who are not ready to die will be bullied into accepting euthanasia.
4) The poor and those requiring benefit payments and State support will probably be bullied or blackmailed into accepting euthanasia.
5) Relatives who want to benefit from an elderly person’s estate will arrange euthanasia for mercenary reasons.
6) Hospitals which want to free up beds will feel free to kill patients.
7) There is a risk, too, that people who arrive at a hospital in an ambulance, having been given a powerful painkiller or tranquilliser, will be invited straightaway to accept a doctor-assisted suicide. And, because they are confused and frightened, they will accept the offer without properly understanding the consequences. Doctors involved in patient care should never, ever be involved in promoting, selling or even discussing euthanasia.
8) Some advocates of euthanasia claim that candidates for suicide must have a fatal illness. And some euthanasia programmes begin by saying that a patient must be expected to be dead within six months. Campaigners say that this excludes patients who might live for years. They’re wrong, of course. They’re wrong because prognoses are subjective and they are wrong more often than they are right. I could fill London with people who have been told to prepare themselves for death but who have lived for many years. The advocates for euthanasia assume that it is possible to decide that an illness is fatal. Anyone (doctor or nurse) who announces that an illness is fatal is a fool. I doubt if I am alone in having seen patients who have been told that they were incurable, recover and enjoy long lives – not uncommonly outliving the physician who had told them they were dying. Diagnostic errors are nowhere near as rare as doctors would like to imagine. Dr Vernon Coleman has described how he was wrongly diagnosed with kidney cancer and given six months to live. That was nearly 40 years ago. In fact the radiologists who had made the diagnosis were wrong. Politicians seem to assume that it is possible to predict when a patient is going to die. It isn’t. Very occasionally, a patient will conveniently die as predicted but this, I suspect, is more due to the voodoo or negative placebo factor than due to any brilliance on the part of the forecaster. Doctors, like witch doctors, can have a powerful influence on the outcome of an illness if they give a patient a firm and professional sounding prognosis. In other words, if a doctor says to a patient: ‘You will be dead in six months’ there is a chance that the patient will be dead in six months because the doctor said so. It is rare for patients to die before a forecasting doctor suggests but it is common for patients to live considerably longer. Selecting a patient as suitable for euthanasia on the basis of a prognosis is always dangerous and unjustifiable. Examples of mistaken diagnoses and erroneous prognoses are not difficult to find. A 45-year-old mother of two was told that she had an inoperable tumour on her liver. With no family present she was told that she had between two months and two years to live. (How any doctor can offer such a bizarrely wide prognosis is difficult to understand.) In fact she had a benign liver tumour. She was not told of the error for a month. It was a year before the woman had recovered from the trauma of the mistaken diagnosis. But what if she had been persuaded to accept euthanasia? Another woman who was told that she had terminal cancer was found to be suffering from sarcoidosis. Once again a wrong diagnosis had been made and this time the patient was treated with toxic chemotherapy and subjected to frequent CT scans and medical reviews. The mistaken diagnosis was maintained for four years. A third woman who had a history of breast cancer was told that the cancer had returned and had spread to her lungs. She underwent treatment, including radiotherapy. After five years of believing that she could die at any moment, the woman was told that the hospital had made a mistake and that she actually had bronchiectasis. A 51-year-old man was told that he had advanced amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). A second doctor agreed with the diagnosis which had been made on the basis of a 10 minute examination. The man was told that he would never return to work and would soon be unable to walk. He was contacted by a therapist regarding medically assisted death and began to plan music for his funeral. The man closed his business and told his friends and family the terrible news. He was told that he would not live until the following Christmas. Eventually the man saw a third doctor who told him that he had been misdiagnosed and actually had neuropathy caused by his diabetes. A 65-year-old man was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease and told that he was terminally ill with just six months to live. He was told to choose a hospice. He later found that his symptoms were actually caused by the statins he was taking. When he’d been told he was terminally ill, he stopped the statins and his symptoms disappeared. These case histories are by no means unusual. In countries where assisted killing is in place there will, without doubt, be instances where misdiagnosed patients will choose euthanasia and will die quite unnecessarily. One of the main objections to capital punishment (a process which often takes many years and repeated examinations of the evidence) is the fear that a mistake will be made and an innocent person will be killed. The same objection can and should be raised about medically assisted dying.
Finally, to summarise, you should oppose euthanasia if:
You are over 60 years of age or hope or expect to be over 60 years of age one day You ever feel glum or down in the dumps, upset, worried, fearful or tired of life You are forgetful or absent minded
You have any health problem (diabetes, arthritis, breathing troubles, heart problems, poor vision, poor hearing or incontinence to name but a small selection)
All of those problems and situations could enable doctors and nurses to kill you for your ‘own comfort’ and to do so without asking your permission.
You can make a difference and help stop the horror of doctor-assisted suicide by sharing the truth. Make sure everyone you know reads this book to understand what is happening to us all. Buy copies of this book to send to MPs, newspapers, radio presenters, etc. I have bought and distributed scores of Jack King's book.
Note
Taken with permission from Jack King’s book `They Want to Kill us’. Dr King’s book is available on Amazon as a paperback and an eBook. Click Here if you would like to buy this book
Copyright Jack King August 2024
Just look at how we were sold on abortion. Rare, within the first 12 weeks-and now it’s fine to kill a viable baby up until the point of birth.
This is where euthanasia leads. We've been down this road before. Aren't we supposed to learn from history, lest we be doomed to repeat it?
Useless Eaters: Disability as Genocidal Marker in Nazi Germany
The Journal of Special Education/Catholic Culture, 2002
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=7019
"By 1929, the number of psychiatric patients in all levels of care had almost doubled from the years immediately following World War I. Economic considerations were exacerbated by the Depression beginning in 1929, and inpatient populations grew rapidly as many families of previously deinstitutionalized persons, no longer able to support them, returned them to private and state-run facilities. It was at this point that the seeds of genocide were sown among professionals and ordinary German citizens alike. The juxtaposition of severe economic constraints, crowded asylums, the attachment of levels of economic viability to human worth, and the sense that people with disabilities formed a burdensome and often criminal element in society all significantly added fuel to ethical debates concerning euthanasia and sterilization. By the late 1930s, there was open discussion among many asylum administrators about actually killing inmates.
Euthanasia and Voluntariness
Historically, euthanasia has meant a voluntary request for death without suffering by the patient. However, in the 17th century its meaning was modified to grant the right to alleviate suffering exclusively to physicians. While the meaning and implications of euthanasia changed somewhat over time, it was universally accepted that the act of euthanasia was always voluntary. That is, when individuals exercised their right to voluntarily choose the timing and the manner of their death as a means of ending their suffering, it was a physician's responsibility to assist them. However, in the 1890s the meaning of euthanasia in Europe, and especially in Germany, came to include two other aspects. First, the notion of a voluntary "right to die" was extended to mean that in some instances the request for euthanasia could be made by persons other than the suffering patient. Second, the extraordinary levels of care accorded the terminally ill and asylum inmates again raised the issue of negative human worth and underlined the possibility of involuntary euthanasia; that is, the economic burden that terminal illness or caring for the insane placed on families, caregivers, and the community was a factor to consider in decisions for euthanasia. In one sense, therefore, the debate quickly shifted from the idea of a "gentle death" itself to who would request or abet the patient's demise. Subsequent branches of the debate took up the notion of suffering among humans as comparable to that of animals and the implication that in certain instances humans could be disposed of in the same way — quickly and painlessly. The distinction between voluntary euthanasia and involuntary killing was thus effectively eradicated, and an ominous term was coined for the first time: "life unworthy of life."
In 1920 the concept of living beings not worthy of the life they embodied gained impetus with a tract published by two university professors, Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche. Permission ,for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life articulated key implications for people with disabilities. Binding and Roche called for the killing of people with disabilities, whom they viewed as "incurable idiots" having no will or sense of living. Killing them, therefore, was hardly involuntary euthanasia, that is, the imposition of others' will upon them. This shifted the burden of human existence from simply being alive to requiring an explicit justification for living. For Binding and Roche, therefore, the right to live was to he earned, not assumed. One earned the right to live by being a useful economic contributor to society. Chief among the individuals they saw as being useless were those who seemed to have little or no human feeling, or in their terms, "empty human husks" whose only societal function was the consuming of precious resources while contributing nothing to society in return. In Binding and Hoche's terms, they were "useless eaters" whose "ballast lives" could be tossed overboard to better balance the economic ship of state. In speaking of those with disabilities, and explicitly advocating involuntary euthanasia, Binding and Hoche wrote,
Their life is absolutely pointless, but they do not regard it as being unbearable. They are a terrible, heavy burden upon their relatives and society as a whole. Their death would not create even the smallest gap — except perhaps in the feelings of their mothers or loyal nurses.
Furthermore, Binding and Hoche drove home the economic argument by calculating the total cost expended in caring for such people. They concluded that this cost was "a massive capital in the form of foodstuffs, clothing and heating, which is being subtracted from the national product for entirely unproductive purposes".
Binding and Hoche's polemic was furiously debated across Germany. One strident critic of the Binding and Hoche position was Ewald Meltzer, the director of an asylum in Saxony, who held that many of his charges did indeed have the ability to enjoy life inasmuch as their disabilities would allow. In an attempt to support his belief, Meltzer surveyed the parents of his patients to ascertain their perceptions of disability and euthanasia. To Meltzer's astonishment, the survey results showed a widely held contradiction among the parents that although they had strong emotional ties to their children, they simultaneously expressed, with varying degrees of qualification, a "positive" attitude toward killing them. In fact, only a handful of respondents completely rejected all notions of euthanasia. The results of this survey were a harbinger of future public and official perceptions and actions toward people with disabilities. Meltzer's survey was later used as a major rationale for the killing of thousands of people with disabilities under the National Socialists, whose long-held social perceptions of difference coupled with official state prejudice delineated a series of genocidal markers that doomed significant numbers of people with disabilities during the Nazi era."
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"Propaganda was not limited to film, however, but also appeared in German literature. An exemplar of this work is the novel Sendung und Gewissen (Mission and Conscience), which was turned into a very popular film, Ich Klage an! (1 Accuse!). In the story, a beautiful young woman suffering from multiple sclerosis decides that her life is no longer worth living and requests a "merciful death" at the hand of her husband, a physician. In the film's death scene climax, he administers the fatal injection to his wife, who dies peacefully to the strains of soothing piano music played by a friend in the next room. At his trial, the doctor heroically refuses to allow his colleagues to invent an alibi for the murder and challenges the court by asking, "Would you, if you were a cripple, want to vegetate forever?" Predictably, the court acquits the physician because his actions were merciful, not murderous, a notion reinforced in the closing scenes, where the words of the Renaissance physician Paracelsus are recalled, that "medicine is love".
This type of propaganda, fueled by then current perceptions of disability and euthanasia, profoundly affected the German public. By the late 1930s, requests for mercy killing were being received by Nazi officials. For example, requests were received from a woman ill with terminal cancer and from a man who had been severely injured and blinded in a construction accident. The state was also receiving similar requests from parents of newborns and young infants with severe physical and intellectual disabilities.
To this point, Nazi involvement with mercy killing, while implicit, appears to have been muted and uninitiated by the state. However, social perceptions of disability had been radically modified, and requests for mercy deaths were increasing and were generally viewed as more acceptable, whether conducted by individual citizens or the state. Essentially, disability was widely acknowledged to be a legitimate justification for murder.
Marker 5: Disability as Justification for Individual and State-Sanctioned Murder
The threshold for beginning official killing of people with disabilities was reached in 1937 and 1938, when publicly reported cases of "mercy" killing galvanized the population. Two cases are most often cited. The first, an act of individual commission, involved the murder of a German male with emotional and behavioral disorders by his father. The second, the case of the Knauer child, signified a critical shift from individual citizens' responsibility for and commission of "mercy killing" to that of the state. These two cases heralded a significant shift from voluntary requests by the suffering individual for "merciful" death to decisions to kill made by others based only on the disability of the victim."
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