This summer, The Scrapbook was visiting family at a Fourth of July celebration in downtown Denver. We were settling in and getting ready to watch the fireworks when we were accosted by petitioners. The fact that there is seemingly no time or place in this country where politics is considered an intrusion anymore is surely a sign of civic decline, and we were even more appalled when we found out what it was we were being asked to support. This November, Centennial State voters will be asked to approve a measure legalizing “physician-assisted suicide.”
Euthanasia is a grievous practice that steadily chips away at the basic compassion and humanity of the societies that tolerate it. But even when reasonable people argue there are narrow circumstances where euthanasia might seem humane, rarely do they consider the political ramifications. As Richard John Neuhaus once observed regarding legislative attempts to enforce particular notions of morality, “What is permitted will eventually become obligatory.” We suspect a few decades on, those now mocking Sarah Palin for invoking the specter of Obamacare “death panels” will be the same ones arguing that the actuarial imperatives of America’s newly nationalized health care system mean bureaucrats have a duty to pull the plug on grandpa.
Already in Europe we’ve seen horrible abuse of such laws. Last year in the Netherlands, 56 people were approved for state-funded suicide due to mental health problems, including one controversial case where a young woman in her twenties was allowed to kill herself because she suffered from trauma as a result of being sexually abused. Between 2011 and 2015, the total number of assisted suicides in the Netherlands rose from 3,695 to 5,516. We have more than enough data to conclude that sanctioning suicide for terminal suffering leads to ever larger numbers of people killing themselves for ever less grave reasons.
While euthanasia laws are obviously harmful, writing in National Review, George Weigel notes that the proposed law in Colorado is horrifying in ways that go beyond the obvious:
And while it may not be the most immediately consequential aspect, we were most taken aback by this part of the proposed law: “The death certificate would be required to list the underlying illness, not the auto-euthanization, as the cause of death.”
There’s something of a precedent for this, as increasingly countries and states have been allowing transgendered people to change their sex on their birth certificates. We humbly suggest that there is no better sign that a law is morally suspect than if it dictates that lies be recorded in official documents.
