Peter and Helen Evans

Joe Carter's article "Sympathectomy of the Soul" deals with what's happening in Holland regarding euthanasia.

Part of the cloud of perplexity which surrounds the subject of euthanasia is that the notion of ‘evaluating' human life seems to take on an air of reasonableness. Even Nietzsche got this right. When told by someone that life wasn't worth living, he replied, "Compared to what?" . . . More and more, we are choosing to die ‘institutionally,' thereby submitting to the cost/benefit calculations of those, often government-run, institutions. When the government takes a larger role in our lives, it will inevitably take a larger role in our deaths. Here's an example from Holland,"... over 20,000 life-ending actions had been taken in 1990 without the patient's express consent." That was 20 years ago.

We address this issue, and others in one of our talks. Watch hear

Part of the cloud of perplexity which surrounds the subject of euthanasia is that the notion of ‘evaluating' human life seems to take on an air of reasonableness. Even Nietzsche got this right. When told by someone that life wasn't worth living, he replied, "Compared to what?" Especially in this age of ‘individual empowerment' it is sharply humbling to realize (if we ever do) that our life is NOT one of our many relatively value-able possessions. We resist this humiliating truth, sometimes to the death! And yet... and yet... blessed are those not forced into a cost/benefit calculation in the terminal care of a loved one. We don't like to have our faces rubbed in the Mystery.

The Dutch example shows us the social/legal de-stigmatization of an option that most of us would consider in extremis. In some ways life - and death - was simpler in the days when care-givers could simply say of the dying, "They're in God's hands now." However, our own hands have been so strengthened by medical technology that death is much more often a deliberate decision by us to ‘let go' of whatever intervention we have been applying to the dying person. And more and more, we are choosing to die ‘institutionally,' thereby submitting to the cost/benefit calculations of those, often government-run, institutions. When the government takes a larger role in our lives, it will inevitably take a larger role in our deaths. Here's an example from Holland,"... over 20,000 life-ending actions had been taken in 1990 without the patient's express consent." That was 20 years ago.

We address this issue, and others in one of our talks. Watch hear

Excerpts from Joe Carter's article "Sympathectomy of the Soul" published March 10th on First Things. Read the full article here.

"In 1990, the Dutch government set up a Commission, chaired by Attorney General Jan Remmelink, to investigate and quantify what was happening in the shadows of the law. Using the narrow definition of euthanasia as "active termination of life upon the patient's request," the Remmelink report concluded that 2,300 instances of euthanasia were carried out during 1990. And while the Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) had established in its Guidelines for Euthanasia that terminating a life without a patient's request is "juridically a matter of murder or killing and not of euthanasia," the Remmelink Commission found, through interviews with randomly selected physicians and mailed questionnaires, that over 20,000 life-ending actions had been taken in 1990 without the patient's express consent. These "matters of murder" do not include, as the report notes, the unknown numbers of disabled newborns, children with life-threatening conditions, or psychiatric patients who may have been killed involuntarily but were not included in the survey."

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"According to the Dutch Ministry of Justice, of the 135,675 deaths recorded in 1995, 3,600 (2.4%) were the result of a doctor-assisted termination of life while another 238 (0.3%) were cases of assisted suicide. The most disturbing statistic, however, is that 913 (0.7%) were terminations of life without the express request of the patient. For every three lives ended at the request of the patient, one person was killed without consent. While it is assumed that these cases consisted of terminally ill patients with no chance of survival, no one in the Netherlands knows for certain. Because the numbers are based on self-reporting by physicians, no accurate data exists to determine exactly how many Dutch citizens have been killed against their will."