Belgium Leaps Off Euthanasia Moral Cliff

"Belgium Leaps Off Euthanasia Moral Cliff" was written by Wesley J. Smith and published on www.nationalreview.com on October 31, 2013.

By Wesley J. Smith - October 31, 2013

We have discussed the Belgian legislation that would open euthanasia to children more than once here at Human Exceptionalism. Now, the mainstream media is catching up. From the Washington Post story.

Belgium, where euthanasia is now legal for people over the age of 18, the government is considering extending it to children — something that no other country has done. The same bill would offer the right to die to adults with early dementia. 

Note that the law’s supposed legal constraints are violated with impunity:

Dr. Gerlant van Berlaer, a pediatric oncologist at the Universitair Ziekenhuis Brussels hospital, says the changes would legalize what is already happening informally. He said cases of euthanasia in children are rare and estimates about 10 to 100 cases in Belgium every year might qualify.

“Might qualify?” As a famous U.S. politician recently said, “What difference does it make?” If a case doesn’t qualify, they will kill anyway and then use their lawbreaking as the justification to further expand the law–as has been the Dutch model.

The proposal would also allow the euthanasia of dementia patients who asked to be killed before losing capacity–even if they were then happy. Talk about dictatorship of the past!

And now, we learn that Belgian euthanasia deaths have gone up 25% in one year–to 2% of all deaths. From the La Nuova Bossola story (Google translation)

Twenty-five percent.From time grew from 2011 to 2012…To make known is the Federal Commission for monitoring and evaluation of euthanasia, which broke the news that 1,432 people have asked to be killed or have been helped to take his own life in 2012, against 1,133 in 2011. This is 2% of all deaths in the country.

That would amount to about 50,000 annual U.S. medicalized killings if we had the same rate.

Add in the organ harvesting/euthanasia killings, euthanasia for elderly couples, mentally ill, and sexually exploited despairing people, and we see that Belgium has abandoned any belief in the sanctity/equality of human life.

This is the horrific logic of euthanasia: Once killing is accepted as an answer to human difficulty and suffering, the power of sheer logic dictates that there is no bottom.

What distinguishes Belgium is the frightening enthusiasm with which the Belgian people and doctors have embraced the killing agenda. They have leaped off a vertical moral cliff with a smile on their faces.