An assisted suicide bill sponsored by Greens in Victoria, Australia was defeated handily in the Provincial Parliament. Good. I bring this up because the scope of who would qualify for mercy killing under the proposal was quite broad. From the story:
The Medical Treatment (Physician-Assisted Dying) Bill would have enabled Victorians suffering “intolerably from a terminal or advanced incurable illness” to end their lives.
An “incurable illness” could encompass many afflictions, whether paraplegia, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, HIV, etc. It could even be construed to apply to mental illness. That’s not alarmist. The Swiss Supreme Court, as SHS readers will recall, has declared a constitutional right to assisted suicide for the terminally ill.
Assisted suicide/euthanasia is not really about terminal illness, but about an ideological quest for near death-on-demand as an essential aspect of human freedom, sometimes called “the ultimate civil liberty” within the movement. Laws such as Oregon’s that (currently) limit access to lethal prescriptions to the actually dying are mere way stations. Once euthanasia consciousness is accepted, assisted suicide will expand to active euthanasia and a broad applicability, just as it has in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland.