Send an urgent message to Canadian legislators urging them to stop expanding assisted suicide
(LifeSiteNews) — The “right to die” is a nice way for nice people to talk about killing for convenience. We have heard how the abortionists have used a similar tactic to great effect, branding as a “human right” the legal privilege for women to kill their unborn children at will.
Now the ending of life towards its end has moved beyond the feelgood factor. On March 30, British homosexualist Matthew Parris, himself a reputedly “nice” person, has argued that the cost of keeping the elderly alive means we should consider killing them.
In fact, says Parris, we can’t afford not to.
His piece in The Times is titled, “We can’t afford a taboo on assisted dying.” He frames the sanctity of life as a sort of superstition, appealing to the progressive zeal for busting outmoded taboos – such as the essential value of human life. How stunning and brave.
READ: Euthanasia advocates are abandoning ‘compassion’ to embrace cold-blooded pragmatism
Parris continues with this, “The argument against it is that pressure will grow on the terminally ill to hasten their own deaths – that’s not a bad thing.”
Whether this is a bad thing or not is the issue, at least for people who seek the transvaluation of the value of life. This is not a taboo, but is either basic to humanity or not. We might better ask what sort of society – and government – we might expect in the future, if the sanctity of life is discarded as a matter of civic duty.
Death and the maid
We should thank Matthew Parris for finally saying the quiet part out loud. The argument for Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) has always trumpeted compassion and whispered of cost. It also begins with nicely “compassionate” grounds, before moving on to broader killing fields.
Parris is simply stating as others have before him that rising cases of dementia and “infirmity” in the aged means it is unaffordable to keep them alive.
This development should come as no surprise. Logical inference means the extension of the basis of an argument to the effects it will produce. The talk of rights is at base a cost/benefit analysis of humanity. This is nested within a broader system of belief which sees personal advantage, pleasure, and the avoidance of pain as the highest good. This, to the nice people, is “ethics.”
Even the reliably irrelevant National Review has noticed that this argument creates a “duty to die,” with Wesley Smith saying on April 2, “Parris’s piece clearly lays out the policy and moral issues that we should be debating, rather than the phony-baloney assertions that assisted suicide is only for the terminally ill for whom nothing else can be done to alleviate suffering.”
Smith says this argument is simply the acceptable face of evil:
That is not true, and indeed, such proposals are merely stations on the way to creating a crassly abandoning society in which the weakest and most vulnerable among us become a killable caste.
The path of evil in pursuit of progress is well trodden. It is one which begins with the deliberate rejection of God.
That Parris mentions God only to rule Him irrelevant is, therefore, no surprise. It is obvious that the Liberal project, in whose rights and emancipatory progress Parris clearly believes, began as an attempt to continue Christianity absent Christ.
READ: Ireland moves closer to legalizing euthanasia after gov’t committee recommendation
Progress now seeks to emancipate mankind from humanity, just as feminism has liberated women from womanhood. Mothering was a prison to escape, its bounds of outmoded convention broken by the chemistry and surgery of death by convenience. So too is the value of human life imagined as some trap of ignorance.
Parris dismisses the idea of divinely sanctified human life as absurd, if those who say so are not themselves pacifists. The logic here consistently avoids the central point, which is whether human life has value outside that attributed to it by nice people like Mr. Parris.
To him, God is simply an irrational fiction, to be replaced by clever words in service of the clear sighted annihilation of the precious gift of life.
This is the crux of the issue. Does life have value beyond talk? The words used by the rights-based revolutionaries have notably changed since their social revolution. The cause of progress now exhorts us to look forward to death, and to celebrate it as the enlightened preference of people free of all superstition. They no longer care about being nice about it, either.
Compassion no more
Writing in Unherd in response to Parris, Ashley Frawley said that “Assisted dying advocates are losing their compassion.”
Frawley cites the British journalist Melanie Reid, who was widely praised for talk of the “unaffordable” cost of some lives. Reid, herself wheelchair-bound following a spinal injury, had also argued for a “right to die” for patients “with less than six months to live.”
Reid went on to argue that restricting MAiD to the terminally ill would be indefensible – and “totally arbitrary.”
Frawley noted, however, “For decades, campaigners for assisted dying have hidden behind calls for compassion, dignity and autonomy.”
“Only sometimes did they let the odd quip about certain lives being ‘unaffordable’ slip out.”
Frawley sees how pricing some lives out of the market is now “progressive”:
Usually, advocates shy away from a macabre calculus between life and the bottom line. But for Parris, slashing this taboo is progressive.
As Parris says, “It will become common practice to pose the question without embarrassment, and to weigh the answer up.”
Looking forward to prescribing death “without embarrassment” is the bravery of Parris’ new world order, one where rights and duties and other fine words are helpmeets to a growing industry of death on demand.
This business is expanding both in theory and in practice.
Mental and physical capacity are usually added to the presence of suffering in a compassionate case made for the “right to die.” Life can be worthless, they say. Death is the medicine demanded and denied.
That our society now makes life worthless is also a factor in the right – or the duty – to die.
An expanding business of death
Since its introduction in Canada, MAiD has rapidly escaped the limits of compassionate grounds. It is now offered to those made miserable by the same society which offers them death as a remedy.
With countries such as France moving toward legalizing MAiD, the shocking expansion of the medicine of death in Canada serves as a warning.
This documentary, produced in January 2023, shows how poor Canadians are now only a phone call away from government assisted dying – which can be arranged “in as little as two weeks.”
READ: British horse riding star commits suicide via euthanasia following spinal cord injury
As Frawley points out, “In Canada, where MAiD (medical assistance in dying) has been legalised since 2016, something that was once a stringent law intended only for the terminally ill has been gradually expanded.”
It is now a means of “euthanising the poor.” Frawley continues: “People are requesting MAiD not because they want to die but because they can no longer afford to live.”
Far from being an outrage, this is a policy with considerable support. A survey from May 2023 showed over one-in-four Canadians are in favour of MAiD as a remedy for poverty and homelessness.
The experts say it is unjust to withhold death from those made desperate by a political culture which sees no essential value in their lives. In fact, to deprive them of death is “harmful.” As Frawley says, “Academics suggest withholding MAiD from victims of injustice only causes ‘further harm,’ since those injustices probably aren’t going away any time soon.”
The cure for these injustices is death. It is now branded as a duty, a freedom from taboo, and a sensible financial decision. The expansion of the industry of death is itself the logical conclusion of the exclusion of Christ, the heart of the West, in whose absence life is nothing but the product of a cost/benefit analysis.
READ: Canada’s euthanasia regime considers death less harmful than offering help to live
The reason there is no more Mr Nice Guy from the likes of Parris is simple. The man-made misery of modern life is being monetised, its moral inversion completed in the reduction of the sanctity of life to a superstition.
We have Matthew Parris to thank for his frankness in stating the case plainly. The cure for the crisis created by “progress” is the prescription of death. Thanks to media figures like him, it is one which a growing number of people seem ready to accept.
Send an urgent message to Canadian legislators urging them to stop expanding assisted suicide