In recent days Queensland has become yet another state that has passed laws legalizing euthanasia. We are one of only eight countries in the United Nations that have legalized it. The other 185 nations believe it to be too dangerous. Having decided that the final solution for the unborn was to kill them, this infatuation with death has now moved to those at the other end of the scale. The word euthansas means good death, but that is an euphemism. The practice is really the right to kill. Proponents of the law speak of keeping people alive against their will and life is not worth living, etc, but law already allows adequate pain relief (even if it shortens life); a patient has the right to refuse treatment he or she doesn’t want; the family and the doctor/s have power to decide what measures should be used to prolong life. So what this legislation is about is the right to dispose! What a terrible burden upon doctors to tell them to violate their hippocratic oath. Those who believe they have the right to kill themselves really want to involve others in the process!
You will not find the word euthanasia in the Scriptures, but there are principles laid down that are pertinent to the subject. First, it violates the law against murder, and suicide is self-murder. Attempt as we may to gloss over this type of killing as merciful, murder it is, and premeditated. Prov. 6:16,17 says that God hates hands that shed innocent blood. We are not talking about capital punishment for criminals here, but killing those who have gotten old and infirm. It also violates the law of love. Most of the arguments for euthanasia are from purely selfish motives, including the expense, work, and restrictions placed upon those who have to care for the infirm.
This attitude to illness affects the conscience of the nation. Everything we do has an effect upon us, personally and nationally. God realized that man was susceptible to the hardening of attitudes through the slightest of insensitivities: for example the national Jewish law included procedures that worked against the lender lording it over the lendee (Deut. 24:10-13); the employer was to consider the needs of a poor worker when he went home to sleep(vs. 14,15); harvesters were not to recover crop left behind in order to show pity on the poor. Even the ox that trod the corn was not to be muzzled so that it could enjoy reward for its labour (25:4).
Euthanasia does affect the national mindset – it can’t help but do this! The right to die usually morphs into the obligation to die. The Oregon Health Division reported that in the third year of that state’s euthanasia law, 63% of those who sought and received physician-assisted suicide gave as their reason they feared being a burden to family, friends, and other care-givers. That compared with 23% in the second year! Most of the British House of Lords select committee members initially supported euthanasia, but after a trip to The Netherlands, they unanimously opposed it and concluded It would be next to impossible to ensure all the acts were truly voluntary. We are concerned that vulnerable people – the elderly, lonely, sick or distressed – would feel pressure, whether real or imagined, to request early death. We believe that the message which society sends to vulnerable and disadvantaged people should not, however obliquely, encourage them to seek death, but should assure them of our care and support in life. It is hard to believe that the Queensland Government is so naive to think that the legislation will not be abused, given their experience with that horrible abortion legislation. Despite their assurances to the contrary, since the introduction of the bill abortion rates have risen 58%! In Germany under Hitler abortion was legalized, then the taking of people’s lives if in pain, the sacrificing of humans for medical research, and then finally the cleansing of the race. The N.S.W. Humanist Society have a staged program of “reform”. 1. Assistance for those who wish to commit suicide. 2. Provide for voluntary and “convertible” euthanasia. 3. To provide for non-voluntary euthanasia. Non-voluntary euthanasia would cover babies grossly mentally or physically handicapped. Children grossly mentally or physically handicapped. The severely mentally afflicted. Senile degenerates. They also say If a baby is born with severe mental or physical disabilities, such as are sure to make it a misery to itself or to those who have to look after it, its life should be terminable by legal process before any person becomes emotionally attached to it. Such an horrendous trend would eventually lead to an “Official Euthanasor” who would ultimately control the deaths of the old, the handicapped, the mentally ill and the new-born child. The power to sentence to death those innocents whose only crime was to be born less-than-perfect or grow old and infirm. So the solution to ‘problem’ people becomes “death”, even as we see abortion being used in this way today. Abortions are available at Government expense but pregnancy help receives no government help at all.
How can people think this way? First, by being atheistic! Dostoyevsky said If God is not then nothing is morally wrong. Mortimer Adler wrote …the image that we hold of a man cannot fail to affect attitudes that influence our behaviour in the world of action… In other words, if man is not a creation of God in His image to serve and worship his Creator, but a highly developed animal, why shouldn’t government exercise management over him as we do our pets and livestock? Second, by blindly following the “educated”. Thomas Merton said, ..we rely upon the sane people of the world to protect it from barbarism, madness and destruction. Now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous. It is from the ranks of our educated philosophers and doctors that this doctrine springs from. Shades of Matt. 15:14. Dr. Rene Dubos wrote, A society that blindly accepts the decisions of experts is a sick society on its way to death. Think about it – it was the intelligentsia of the universities, the vaunted medical, legal and psychiatric professors of pre-Nazi Germany who planted and nurtured the anti-life movement in the German culture. As Paul Marx noted, The German atrocities began as the voluntary deeds of eminent scientists, not as the reluctant response to a mad despot’s commands. We must realize that no matter how well- educated a man is, if he does not believe in the Bible, anything can come from him, and as George Santayana said Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Third, the hardness of heart is a key element. George Paulsen said, How long shall life be preserved when there is no redeeming social value? If life has no apparent purpose, perhaps it is to the benefit of others that such lives should not be salvaged. In 1996 the Australian House of Reps voted to overturn the Northern Territory Euthanasia legislation, and the Senate confirmed it in 1997. Dying continues to happen as it always has, so what has changed in the intervening years? – only the hearts of the people!
All this is not to say that dying is not a complex issue in some instances. Years ago the problem was simpler because of the lack of good life-saving devices – you either recovered from ailments or died. Now we have various life-support systems which can keep a person alive who would normally die without them. Some suggest that this being the case we should let people die. But the person who makes that point would take a blood-transfusion or anti-biotics if needed, because we regard the ability to save life an advance in medical knowledge. Another principle comes in here (John 15:13; 1 John 3:16). A person can lay down his life for another. If there was a queue for a life-saving machine, one could nobly ‘suicide’ for another, but this is a different scenario than what we are confronting in euthanasia.
To be sure, there are many who are ill, in pain, and who are in fear at the prospect of death – they fear pain, suffering, isolation, being unloved and rejected. Better care for the dying is the answer. Many experts in the field of palliative care say that if pain is not under control then the patient is being mismanaged. The idea of “dying with dignity” is a misnomer. How can the act of killing be a “dignified” death!? The opponents of capital punishment by lethal injection claim it is “cruel and unusual”, anything but “dignified” – we can’t have it both ways. Job’s wife looked at her suffering husband and she said Curse God and die (2:9). She was pro-euthanasia. Job’s reply is instructive – You speak as one of the foolish women speak. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil? The idea that because life had gotten tough it was reason to opt out was abhorrent to Job. Life was given by God, lived under the providence of God, and was to be ended in God’s timing. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.
The upshot of the case of Job? Job recovered from his illness and had more children, twice as much wealth as before, and lived to a good old age. I’m glad he didn’t listen to the call the pull the plug!
