Submitted by : Claire gooski
October 25, 2012 By Rebecca Hamilton
Euthanasia is a growing problem throughout the Western world. I would guess
that this is due in large part to the overall decline in respect for human life.
We no longer see a human being as uniquely valuable in and of themselves. We do
not grant anyone an intrinsic right to life.
We opened the doorway to legalized killing when we decided that all people
may be killed without compunction before they are born. By granting one simple
?choice? to kill their own child to women, we swept away all our
responsibilities to address the violence and misogyny that made abortion seem
necessary.
Abortion made killing those who are inconvenient, or whose lives forced us
into a moral conundrum, an acceptable ?solution.? We killed the unborn rather
than give up our misogynist ways. We turned the noble cause of human rights on
its head and claimed that the legal freedom to kill the most helpless humans was
a basic human right. We discarded 2,000 years of Christian teaching and
proclaimed that abortion was actually a moral option.
It was a short step from there to deciding that illness and suffering
needed a quick and ?merciful? end. Rather than use the pain medications we have
and care for those who are elderly or infirm, we quickly moved to the argument
that killing them was the ?moral? and ?humane? thing to do. First we called it
?mercy killing.? When that gentle phrase became tainted, the advertising folks
supplied a new one. Today we call it ?death with dignity.?
Somewhere along the line, we lost the understanding of just how dangerous a
doctor who no longer feels a responsibility to be a healer can be. Doctors are
rapidly becoming the new executioner class of our society.
Abortion, euthanasia, much medical research, are all killers. They kill
people. These changes in our legal structure that the nihilists among us keep
pushing are metamorphosing a medical license from a license to heal into a
license to kill.
We have trusted our doctors so completely for so long that I think a lot of
us can not fathom the sheer killing power of modern medicine. If these drugs,
devices and treatments we trust doctors to wield in good faith fall into the
hands of a medical profession that has been cut lose from any legal
responsibility to act in their patients? best interest, what fate awaits us
all?
I remember back when abortion was first legalized, pro life people said it
would lead to euthanasia. I thought they were nuts. I thought they would say
anything to make their point. They talked about the dangers of cloning, the
destruction of the family, the eventual rise of euthanasia and the concept of
human beings as disposable.
And I thought they were nuts.
I can tell you now, I was the one who was nuts.
They were right. They were absolutely, dead-on accurate in their
predictions of where this new power to define a group of people as having no
right to life would lead us. They understood it, but no one, including me, would
listen to them. They were the cranks. The religious nuts. The woman
haters.
I used to rant about fanatics who thought that a fertilized egg should have
more rights than a 14-year-old girl. I was furious about this. I mean
irate.
God changed me. Changing me wasn?t easy, not even for Him. I fought Him
hard on this. I argued. I debated. I prayed. I hid from it. I fought because my
feelings about women?s rights, in particular as they pertain to violence against
women, are so strong that they cut right through me.
These feelings are so strong that I fought God rather than just obey Him.
But love is patient and it is kind. Rather than bring down lightning bolts on my
stubborn head, He just kept showing me I was wrong. It took a while, but He got
through to me. And now, I?m trying to get through to other people.
Killing is never the answer to anything. All human life matters. Every
single human being has an intrinsic value and right to life and we may not
tamper with it. That is the order of things. The first premise. We must, as
Christians, reason our actions from there.
Largely because of women like me, abortion as a legal right prevailed back
in that day. It is holding on strong now. But the predictions of the pro life
people are all coming true alongside it.
Abortion is just the smallest part of the burgeoning culture of death that
surrounds us today. Sadly, most of it has its beginnings in our medical research
facilities and our institutions of medical care. Euthanasia is legalized medical
murder. It moves the death dealing from the unborn, who we cannot see and can
allow ourselves to think is not real, to the sick, the infirm and the elderly.
Euthanasia is the legal power to kill the men and women who are entrusted to our
care by virtue of their various weaknesses.
You cannot deny the reality of the life you are taking with euthanasia.
There is no ?it?s just tissue/it can?t feel pain? wiggle room here. This is
cold-blooded, face-to-face, undeniable murder of a human being by medical
means.
Euthanasia turns your doctor into your executioner. It our responsibility
as Christians to oppose it absolutely.
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