The euthanasia movement is, at its core, an ugly and inhumane thing. From the biblical commandment of "Thou shall not kill" to Hippocrates' primary dictum for physicians, "Do no harm", to the millenia old understanding of compassion as meaning caring for the sick rather than belting them on the head, Western civilization well knows that murdering people because they're old or sick or otherwise troublesome is a horrible and socially destructive practice.Therefore, it remains a primary task of the euthanasia movement to disguise the raw truth of its ends through semantic tricks and distracting devices. Among these are the various "brain death" myths, cost containment (which always turns out to be care containment) and the game of defining futile care.
In this brief piece from Secondhand Smoke, medical ethicist Wesley J. Smith discusses how the always morphing phenomena of futile care is even being given shameful assistance these days from "progressive" Catholics.
Smith concludes by asking, "Can we please stop pretending that futile care is about doing patients and their families with heterodox end-of-life views a favor? Coercion -- because that is what we are talking about here -- is not going to make the patient’s deaths go down any easier with the expression of such compassionate sentiments. Nor will futile care theory -- and its even tougher older brother health care rationing -- improve the public’s fraying faith and trust in the health care system overall.
Read the Secondhand Smoke post here.
