Protesting Assisted Suicide

I was quite annoyed with a young man at a public meeting who read out an essay protesting assisted suicide. He started out with a slippery slope logical fallacy by saying it would inevitably lead to wholesale slaughter of the mentally retarded, mentally ill, homeless and others who did not want to die. He asserted this was the way things were done in the Netherlands without offering any supporting evidence. I have a friend who works as a nurse in the Netherlands tending to the terminally ill. We have discussed euthanasia, and nothing like this ever came up. In the man reading the essay’s opinion, palliative care was sufficient therefore nobody should be permitted assisted suicide.

At the meeting, many other people told stories of extreme suffering and how palliative care was not sufficient. Yet his position was My religion opposes assisted suicide, therefore everyone should do as my religion commands. I had to hold myself back from shouting out to tell him to get stuffed and that he was not my mother. He is welcome to suffer as much as he wants, but not to impose it on me.

This man was half the age of most of the people at the meeting. He looked as though a hangnail was the worst pain he had ever experienced, but still he believed himself qualified to dictate everyone else in the room how they must handle their end of life decisions and to override their decisions. Such is the arrogance of Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)