Friday, February 6, 2015

Are We Creating A Culture of Death?

 
Who are we to decide when someone dies?  Is life not sacred anymore?  We kill babies in the womb everyday on a whim. Today the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the ban on assisted suicide.
In a unanimous decision, The Supreme Court Friday struck down as unconstitutional the nation’s contentious century-old law against assisted suicide.
I don't know where you stand but I believe in the sanctity of  life, all life.   Campaign Life Coalition.
has a point.
Today the Supreme Court of Canada ignored it's own jurisprudence from 1993 and attempted to legislate from the bench by declaring Canada's criminal code prohibitions on euthanasia and assisted suicide to be "unconstitutional". The fact that the Court ignored its own legal precedent, abondoning the important legal principle of stare decisis (let the decision stand), is disturbing enough. It moves us into an era where case law may now be superceded by the personal opinions of nine judges.
Even more disturbing is the fact that the court justified its unanimous ruling with the ludicrous claim that prohibiting the killing of patients by doctors somehow violates section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That section states: "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof". By what mental gymnastics can one interpret the right to not be deprived of life, as a positive right to be lethally injected by your doctor?
This shameful ruling essentially orders parliament to scrap the existing law, and craft a new one which grants doctors the right to kill their patients. The court even goes so far as to dictate to parliament what elements the law should contain, including granting euthanasia to people with "permanent and intolerable, physical or mental suffering".This can be interpreted to mean that people who are not even dying but just have chronic pain, must be helped to kill themselves. It is also frightening to realize that "mental suffering" can be interpreted to include those who are not even physically ill, but merely depressed. 

We murder babies in the womb at all stage of development, now this. When did we as a society start to become a culture of death? Since when do we have a right to decide when someone dies?
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Like everyone else, I don't wish to see anyone suffer.  Sure we can do more but palliative care is a better way. That's where the emphasis should be. God is the giver of life not man. God should be the one to decide when we die not man.

Life is precious, let's treat it as such.

Update:  Interesting take from James Lunney CPC MP from Nanimo-Alberni
Palliative care, end of life specialists, and caregivers like California- based Rachel Naomi Remen will tell you that there is a lot we don’t know about death and dying,; that perhaps there are aspects that are beyond our instruments ability to measure or analyze. Perhaps we ought to treat the process of dying with an abundance of care and respect.
That, of course, was the Gold Standard established by the ancient and revered Greek physician, Hippocrates. His famous Oath has been “customized” in recent decades. The original (medicinenet.com) reads in part:
                     “…I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my art.”
Doctors themselves will have to grapple with this issue. Will they side with “The Father of Medicine”, or embrace the brave new world that physicians disavowed for millennia?
Andrew Coyne:
But it is not in the administration of the law that I fear we will see the “slippery slope” at work so much as it is in its interpretation. Perhaps the Court’s confidence that “safeguards” can be devised that will prevent the spread of euthanasia beyond the competently adult and the clearly consenting is well placed. But there can be no safeguard against the Court’s own future decisions.
Some day, someone is going to bring a case before the Court arguing that children with an incurable disease and in “intolerable” pain should also have the right to assisted suicide, perhaps with their parents’ consent. Is the Court really going to condemn them to endure years of excruciating pain until they are of age? Likewise, is it really prepared to leave the mentally incompetent to suffer unbearably, when with the signature of a legal guardian they could be released? Or if personal autonomy is all, why should a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” be required? Isn’t it enough that you want to be dead, but need someone to help?
At that point the Court will be caught, helpless before its own logic. And by then, so will we.
Ezra Levant-Doctors Killing Their Patients


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