By Hilary White
LONDON, November 17, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The push is on around the world to legalise “a broad array of private killing” no matter whether it is being called “assisted suicide” or outright euthanasia, US lawyer and anti-euthanasia campaigner Wesley J. Smith told an audience in London last night.
At a lecture to anti-euthanasia activists at the Cadogan Hotel, Smith said that the distinction between assisted suicide and outright euthanasia is becoming academic. The two, he said, “are like one leg following the other when walking.”
The push for euthanasia is based on a two-part ideology, he said. First that killing is an acceptable solution to human suffering, and second, that autonomy is the highest personal good. This ideology represents a radical remaking of society's traditional values, from those predicated on equality of the person to one in which “people's lives exist on different tiers of value.”
Smith criticized the criteria used by the UK's Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) in recently issued draft guidelines on the application of the assisted suicide law, saying they are the same as those being used in a Scottish bill that proposes to legalise assisted suicide. Both the bill and the guidelines propose that assisting suicide should not be prosecuted where the deceased was terminally ill, neurologically degenerating, or seriously physically disabled.
He pointed out that the 2002 law allowing euthanasia in the Netherlands had its origins in prosecutorial guidelines which were relaxed at the behest of judges in the 1970s.
Writing of his London trip on his blog at First Things website, Smith said that he had met some euthanasia activists who demonstrated to him that the problem is two “divergent and incompatible world views.”
“What is each of our – and society's – duty to the ill, disabled, and despairing who 'want to die?' I say, that we should value their lives, even if they can't at the particular moment. That means suicide prevention, interventions to make life more bearable, love and inclusion to help the suicidal make it to a hoped-for new dawn.
“In contrast, my opponents here said, generally speaking, we should help them die.”
Anthony Ozimic who attended the London lecture and serves as communications manager of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, one of the leading anti-euthanasia groups in Europe, commented to LSN that the pro-euthanasia rhetoric is not “based on compassion” but on “ideology and subtle deceits” that have been promulgated by the media especially successfully in Britain.
“Judging from both live debates and debates in print,” he said, “the British euthanasia lobby is increasingly rattled that these deceits are being exposed.”
“The anti-religious prejudice of ardent euthanasia activists is frequently on display in the blogosphere, and now even in suicide notes.”
Ozimic cited the case of Dennis Milner, the elderly man who committed suicide with his wife earlier this month. Milner has been revealed to have been a Voluntary Euthanasia Society supporter and committed communist who sent his suicide note to the press, in which he attacked both religion and the existing ban on assisted suicide.
“These angry misanthropes,” Ozimic said, “are impatient to undermine the idea of modern human rights because that idea has its origins in the Christian tradition of the natural moral law.”