The Telegraph recently reported the horrifying news that a doctor in Holland had been cleared of charges after she drugged an elderly woman suffering from dementia, had her family hold her down, and killed her. The laws in Holland are such that what occurred falls under the rubric of “euthanasia.” The grim practice is on the rise in Europe and elsewhere. According to a 2015 report in the Financial Times, about 3 percent of all Dutch deaths are now the result of euthanasia. Even more horrifying is that you no longer have to be terminally ill to be euthanized in many places. Mental illness is an increasingly common justification. In the Netherlands, a young woman in her twenties was allowed to euthanize herself based on suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from sexual abuse.
There are no doubt deep cultural explanations for the rise of euthanasia, but enthusiasm for legalization is owed in part to the imperatives of the welfare state. Canada’s National Post last week reported on a new study that concluded euthanasia could save Canada’s overburdened national health care system up to $139 million a year. “The authors go to pains to state they aren’t suggesting people be voluntarily euthanized to save money,” notes the National Post. But if they didn’t want people to make a connection to cost-savings, there would be no reason to do the study.
So far only a handful of states in this country have started down the deadly path blazed by the Dutch. Most recently, voters in Colorado passed a euthanasia law last fall that is so broadly written it will surely cause a jump in “medically assisted end-of-life care,” as the absurd euphemism has it. In Colorado, you need two doctors to sign off on allowing you to kill yourself. But that’s not much of a restriction. A friendly dermatologist and psychiatrist would suffice to diagnose you as terminally ill and sign off on your suicide. America’s opioid epidemic spread in part because of “pill mills” run by doctors who prescribed vast amounts of painkillers for profit. It’s not hard to imagine “suicide mills” where, for a price, anyone can purchase a ticket to his own demise.
The good news is that Colorado may also, in a way, help inspire Americans to resist the euthanasia movement. Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, a fourth-generation Coloradan, has just been nominated to the Supreme Court and is likely to be confirmed. It’s an excellent pick for many reasons, among them that Gorsuch is the author of an impressive anti-euthanasia work, The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. It’s a wonderful book, if for no other reason than that Gorsuch, like his predecessor Antonin Scalia, is the rare judge who can write with force and wit.
The judge is a Christian (an Episcopalian who went to Catholic prep school), but he emphasizes that his case against euthanasia is grounded in “secular moral theory.” He grapples with the arguments of influential thinkers on these matters, including the damnable Peter Singer, who remains a darling of the establishment despite advocating infanticide. (In 2015 Singer said, “I don’t want my health insurance premiums to be higher so that infants who can experience zero quality of life can have expensive treatments.”)
Though it came out a decade ago, Gorsuch’s book has proved regrettably prescient, as he warned that such conditions as depression would soon become pretexts for state-sanctioned suicide. “Once we open the door to excusing or justifying the intentional taking of life as ‘necessary,’ we introduce the real possibility that the lives of some persons (very possibly the weakest and most vulnerable among us) may be deemed less ‘valuable,’ and receive less protection from the law, than others,” he wrote.
Supreme Court hopefuls often keep their core beliefs to themselves, but Gorsuch writes that his book is “premised on the idea that all human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.” There’s not a lot to be optimistic about these days, but the thought of a justice guided by such an important truth sitting on the High Court is a reason to hope.
