The Political Hat

     Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.

     The focus this time: Who’s really crazier? The killers or the killed?

     First, a little mood music:

     Carrying on…

     Killing patients has become so normalized, we are entering a danger zone where no one will be safe.

“Our good friend in these parts, health-care-policy expert and delight Sally Pipes, CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, writes in Forbes:

“‘Advocates say these laws spare the terminally ill from unnecessary suffering. But a closer look at Europe and Canada—where physician-assisted suicide has been legal and common for years—paints a darker picture. Far from providing peace to terminal patients, these laws are often used by government-run healthcare systems to nudge sick patients toward ending their lives.’

“In writing about the push for assisted suicide, she quotes from a friend of some of us, who has been mentioned here before. The column opens:

“‘Dovie Eisner was born with a rare genetic condition called nemaline myopathy. He requires a wheelchair and has a host of other health problems. Last year at one point, he stopped breathing, passed out on the street, and was taken to the emergency room.

“‘“I was alive—thanks to the determination of law enforcers and local medical personnel to keep me that way,” Eisner wrote recently in UnHerd. But, he warns, a law being considered in his home state of New York “threatens to undo this presumption in favour of lifesaving” that motivated first responders to keep him alive.

“‘The bill, called the Medical Aid in Dying Act, would allow mentally competent adults with six months or less to live “to obtain a prescription that would put them to sleep and peacefully end their lives.”’

“Dovie, as I’ve mentioned, has been in a coma since shortly after his piece was published on Unherd and a version was picked up by the New York Post and later the Free Press. Thanks be to God his devoted parents are his advocates, treasuring his precious life. In other circumstances, given the priorities of the medical industry today and a culture that seems so allergic to any kind of suffering (I hate it, too, but it’s part of life) that it would entertain the possibility of assisted suicide for eating disorders ever being appropriate – Dovie would be in exactly the danger he worried about.”

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