Forget the slippery slope: Belgium’s lethal leap

In Belgium, the parental permission slip covers a new field trip.

Not long after learning cursive, an 8-year-old with a terminal illness or some intractable disability now can write a letter – in perfect penmanship – asking a doctor to kill him, with his parents’ permission, of course.

Imagine the text: “Dear Doc, My parents and I have suffered too much, and there is no other way. Please give me 100 Tylenol, and don’t call me in the morning. Your devoted friend, Johnny.”

The assisted-suicide permission slip, approved overwhelmingly last week by the Belgium Parliament, is the logical conclusion of an evil premise, says Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a consultant to the Patients Rights Council.

“Once you accept that killing is an acceptable answer to human suffering, then that becomes the so-called ‘right to die,’” Smith said. “How in the world do you limit any right and any kind of supposed, logical beneficence to a very narrow category of people? In this view, why wouldn’t you euthanize children?”

In Belgium, euthanasia is a cottage industry that is exploding faster than waffle dough in hot grease.

Belgian law has permitted the euthanizing of disabled twins – the two brothers were cobblers who suffered from a disorder that would lead inevitably to blindness, and they could not bear the thought of not being able to see each other.

A Belgian woman asked to be euthanized after she was the victim of botched sex-change surgery.

Throw in the altruistic motivation of a person wanting to help society through organ donations or by cutting health-care costs, and the assisted-suicide train steams headlong off the cliff.

“This new law is just the next logical extension,” Smith said. “Once you go down this road, there’s no way to stop because there are no brakes, once you’ve accepted a philosophical and ideological premise that does not permit any permanent, final conclusion.”

In the Netherlands to the north, the number of mentally ill people euthanized has jumped from 13 to 45 in one year, Smith said.

“The reason for that is two years ago, in one of the major psychiatric journals in the Netherlands, there was a call for psychiatrists to get into the ‘killing game’ – which is my terminology,” Smith said. “Sometimes people with severe mental illness suffer more than people with a physical illness. That anguish is probably the worst thing you can experience. So, once you’ve decided that killing is an acceptable answer to cancer because of suffering, why wouldn’t it be an acceptable answer to schizophrenia or terrible depression?”

The United States has dipped its toe into the assisted-suicide water. In Oregon, which allows assisted suicide, Barbara Wagner requested a chemotherapy drug under state-rationed Medicaid that would not have cured her but would have extended her life by an extra year or so.

“The Medicaid people said, ‘We won’t pay for your chemo, but we will pay for your assisted suicide,’” Smith said. “The United States is probably going more slowly than the Netherlands and Belgium, but that’s exactly where we’ll go, too, if the popular culture widely accepts euthanasia.”

Smith said society’s compelling interest has shifted from “promoting righteousness and liberty to making sure no one suffers.”

“And once you’ve decided that eliminating suffering is the overriding purpose of society, eliminating the sufferer is the logical next step,” he said. “The concept of suffering becomes elastic. Some would claim society is suffering by having to care for expensive people. Pushing for health-care rationing and limiting access to medical treatment – these things are all connected.”

The specifics of the new Belgian law are chilling. There is no age limit set for someone who wants to die.

“To show you how unenforceable this is, it’s supposed to be based on whether the child can understand the consequences of what he orshe is deciding, based on how the doctor perceives it,” Smith said. “The child has to ask to be killed in writing. Can you imagine anything more cruel than that?”

Smith said the reason the law passed was to provide legal cover to doctors who were already killing children. If they were doing that already without legal protection, Smith said, why should anyone believe doctors would comply with new guidelines?

“Say there’s a 7-year-old boy with leukemia,” Smith said. “So, you want to be killed? Give me a letter. How do you do that? Pretty soon they won’t be asking for their written permission or they won’t be asking for parental consent. Why should parents have to suffer and make that decision? We’ll just do it quietly for them and say their kid died.”

Smith hopes an alarm will ring in the U.S. about the logical consequences of euthanasia. Many can understand the dignity of unborn human life, he said.

“But can they see the patient with AIDS or the elderly woman in the nursing home in the same light?” he asked. “If you look at people and say, ‘I wouldn’t want to live like that,’ pretty soon those people become disposable. That’s why the disability rights activists are so active in this issue, because they see themselves as the primary targets. They’ve said, ‘Holy cow, they’re coming for us!’ And they’re right.”

Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected]