Posted on May 5, 2026
Slip-Sloping Away
Suicide horrors are mounting rapidly
by
Daniel Clark
A Swiss
clinic called Pegasos, which bills itself as a "voluntary
assisted dying organization," recently helped to kill a physically healthy
56-year-old British woman, who wanted to die because she was distraught over
the death of her son. Back when Jack
Kevorkian was on the prowl in the 90s, those who warned that it would come to
this were widely derided for peddling hyperbolic slippery slope arguments that
would never pan out. Assisted suicide
was only for people with terminal illnesses, we were told. It was for dying people who were in extreme,
untreatable pain, they said. There were
even those who regarded Dr. Kevorkian as an angel of mercy.
According to a 2000 study in the New
England Journal of Medicine, only 25 percent of Kevorkian's "patients" had
been terminally ill. Kevorkian himself
advocated not just assisted suicide, but also nonconsensual mercy killing. It was Derek Humphry, co-founder of the
pro-euthanasia Hemlock Society, who explained in a 1998 book that old, infirmed
people should want to kill themselves, not to ease their own suffering, but to
unburden those around them. "Is there, in fact, a duty to die," he asked,
rhetorically, "a responsibility within the family unit -- that should remain
voluntary but expected nonetheless?"
While on the one hand, the leaders of this movement were decrying
slippery slope arguments, on the other they were already expressing a zeal to
descend the slope as rapidly as possible.
It was
only a matter of time before the killings became institutionalized as a pseudo-medical
treatment for the ailment we call life.
In Canada, "Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD)"
is offered to patients who had not even brought up the subject themselves. In Belgium and the Netherlands, they have
made assisted suicide available to depressed teenagers. In Switzerland, when Pegasos
received complaints from family members of one of its "patients" earlier this
year, it responded with the explanation that "she felt alone and
superfluous. She also did not want to
grow old." Is that all it takes?
In an even
more disturbing trend, which is being followed closely by conservative
columnist Wesley Smith of National Review, those countries with the most
liberal euthanasia laws are soliciting organ donations from the
soon-to-be-deceased, thus giving the state an undisguised ulterior motive. Considering the waiting times for legitimate
medical care in places with single-payer systems, submitting oneself for immediate
death and dissection might sound like an acceptable alternative, especially
since it would be presented as the noble thing to do. The flip side is that the subject would be
made to feel guilty if he chose to cling to his own organs until his natural
death.
If there's
any doubt that this is the intended result, note that in the same book in which
Humphry coined the phrase "duty to die," he also pitched assisted suicide as
"one method of cost containment." So
we're killing old people who aren't terminally ill, physically healthy people
who are having psychological and emotional problems, and people who have become discouraged by poverty and debt. Well, why not? It's their duty, after all. More resources for the rest of us.
That sort of coercion is not so far
from the point of deciding that the individual doesn't even need to consent to
being killed. If the greater good of the
collective supersedes the interests of the individual, why should the
individual have veto power over decisions of life and death?
This
mentality is reflected in the opinion of the Quebec College of Physicians, that
MAiD should be extended to diseased and handicapped
newborns, who of course have not asked for any such "assistance." If this sounds like an unoriginal thought,
maybe that's because Australian bioethicist Peter Singer has advocated the same
thing for decades, and he is a widely respected and influential academic in the
United States and elsewhere. In fact, he
was the chairman of the University Center for Human Values at Princeton for 25
years.
Most of
the Western world is already doing a version of what Singer suggested, except
that the children in these cases have not yet been born. In 2017, the government of Iceland celebrated
the eradication of Down's Syndrome in that country. It wasn't really the chromosomal disorder
that was eliminated, however, just all of the people who had it. Nearly 100 percent of unborn children with
Down's Syndrome are being aborted there, as the result of an
intensive testing regimen, combined with overbearing "counseling."
Iceland is
merely following the March of Dimes tactic that if you can't prevent birth
defects by preventing the defects, you do it by preventing the births. That organization is officially neutral on
the abortion issue, but it encourages the use of amniocentesis to test for Down's
Syndrome, with the expectation that something be done about it if the test
comes back positive. In this manner,
about two thirds of those afflicted are being killed before birth in our
country.
Many of
those responsible actually claim to be advocates for people with Down's
Syndrome. Even former Icelandic
president Guoni Johannesson made a show of observing
World Down's Syndrome Day. Such behavior
serves to create the impression that the killing is done for the victims' own
good.
The idea
that there is anything merciful about these killings is belied by the fact that
people with Down's Syndrome suffer no physical pain from it, as well as by the appearance
that they are no less happy than the average person. It cannot be that they are being put out of
their misery, because they haven't got any.
They're merely being made to fulfill their duty to die, and there's no
logical reason to expect that duty to expire once they have been born.
It seems
like every few months there's a new atrocity, but they're all based on the same
old, atrocious premise, that there are some human lives that are not worthy to
be lived. Holocaust comparisons tend to evoke
hostile reactions regardless of how valid they may be, but perhaps we can at
least take a lesson from a fictionalized version of that chapter in history, Judgment
At Nuremberg. At the end of that
movie, German judge Ernst Janning tries to elicit sympathy from his American
counterpart, Judge Dan Haywood, who had presided over his trial. "Those people," he says. "Those millions of people. I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it. You must believe it."
Judge Haywood's
reply: "Herr Janning, it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to
death you knew to be innocent."
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