January 29, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – The ugly question demands an answer—and soon. Who is to perform euthanasia? Humbly, in the spirit Jonathan Swift’s famous Modest Proposal, I submit that the answer is staring us in the face.
First, the problem. While Canada’s progressive thought leaders have unanimously agreed that people seeking death have a right to society’s assistance when disability makes suicide undoable, not many doctors want to do the dirty deed the estimated 7,000 times a year required.
Like progressives everywhere, Canada’s euthanasiasts now control both civil governments and the medical professions in most provinces and Canada. Yet the doctors themselves, as represented by the Canadian Medical Association, opposed euthanasia and assisted suicide until the Supreme Court decreed them rightful. Such subgroups as Catholic and Evangelical Protestant doctors still oppose both ways of killing.
The palliative care doctors oppose it and also adamantly don’t want to get stuck with the job, because it goes against the job they chose for themselves, which is making the last days of the terminally ill as pleasant as possible.
It’s pretty clear from a recent article in the National Post that Canada’s anaesthesiologists are also afraid of getting the repellent assignment. After all, they are likely candidates because they already inject medications into people’s bloodstreams and must calculate the proper mixture knowing that injury or death could result from a miscalculation.
What if they miscalculated on euthanasia? The Quebec government’s issuance of one-size-kills-all kits to its medical profession makes clear it anticipates no such difficulty. But Dr. Cheryl Mack warns in an article in the latest issue of the Canadian Journal of Anaesthesia that if the pain-killing part of the fatal recipe is wrong the person could be left conscious and able to experience the pain of his organs shutting down one by one.
Writes Mack: “We suggest the burden of proof lies with the Supreme Court to demonstrate the legitimacy of the nomination of physicians as the exclusive purveyors of a non-medical practice, particularly when the ethos of medicine has historically forbidden participation in this very act.”
Talk about being stick-in-the muds. What the palliative care doctors and the anaesthesiologists are on about is that oath all doctors used to take named after its author Hippocrates. Back in the 5th Century B.C., he was particularly concerned with distinguishing medicine from poisoning, since the two occupations were somewhat confused at the time by their reliance on the same pool of natural remedies.
The key part of his oath reads thus: “ With regard to healing the sick … I will take care that they suffer no hurt or damage. Nor shall any man’s entreaty prevail upon me to administer poison to anyone; neither will I counsel any man to do so.”
The Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons has a better idea: whatever the patient wants, including death, it is the doctor’s duty to provide.
Clearly Dr. Susan O’Leary, president of the Canadian Anaesthesiologists’ Society, disagrees. “I think a lot of people feel uneasy with the entire concept of this,” she told the National Post. “This is not what we intended when we became anaesthesiologists.”
So who is to do it? Dr. Will Johnston, the head of the B.C. wing of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, somewhat whimsically suggested that if Canada still had the death penalty, professional hangmen would have been the logical choice.
Of course: the fussy, self-indulgent Canadians who champion euthanasia would never put up with the severe and chilling facilities in Canada’s prisons. They want to be coddled and cosseted and treated like the masters and mistresses of their fate they deem themselves to be. Only hospitals staffed by their respectful, soft-spoken, white-robed priests and priestesses of medicine will do for them.
But wait, even as Canada abolished its death penalty and its hangmen, it slowly opened the legal doors to the wholesale slaughter of more than a hundred thousand human beings annually, and more than a million and a half in total. In so doing, a new profession was born: the full-time abortionist!
It’s a no-brainer. Abortionists already are well-trained in the use of fatal medications. They already treat the women who provide them their livelihood with the required due deference, while ever mindful that, you know, the clock is ticking, time is money and the next unborn baby is in the waiting room. And the best qualification of all, philosophically they are already way past having any moral qualms about killing human beings.
And let’s face it, as a group they could use a boost. Many smaller communities don’t have abortionists at all. For the very reasons given above, most doctors just don’t want to kill people despite decades of being told that unborn babies aren’t people.
But if in Canada there is already a stigmatized group of doctors who have closed their hearts to the silent screams of the most vulnerable, it wouldn’t be a stretch at all for them to take on killing the elderly, terminally ill, disabled, or just temporarily depressed. Maybe between the two jobs there’d be enough business to sustain a practice even in those rural communities which are woefully denied abortion services. And if not quite enough, there’s always a need for cattle feed in rural Canada. Maybe a third income stream from the sale of the remains from euthanasia and abortion would make the abortion/euthanasiast’s job more attractive.
After all, when Jonathan Swift mocked English hard-heartedness with his Modest Proposal to solve Irish starvation by feeding the adults their own children, some took him seriously. And in reality, executioners in Early Modern Germany supplemented their incomes by rendering the remains of those they killed down for various industrial purposes. Why, until a year or so ago, British Columbia shipped its medical waste, including the bodies of aborted unborn babies, to Oregon to generate fuel in a waste-to-energy plant.
I think it’s a winner.
Editor’s note: The foregoing “proposal” is, naturally, and one hopes evidently, offered in the same satirical spirit as Swift’s own modest proposal.