It's back-to-school time in many parts of the country. Will students be painting coffins in the playgrounds? Will they have field trips to funeral homes for pajama parties?
What dark planet have I come from, asking such questions? Only our next-door neighbor, Canada. The above activities are suggestions offered by a podcast for how we can normalize medically assisted suicide -- getting children used to the idea of people in their lives being killed by their doctors.
During a panel discussion in Manhattan recently, a credentialed, mainstream doctor explained that she is increasingly hearing from young trainees wondering why suicide has any kind of taboos around it. Who's to say when suicide becomes something we should prevent?
A piece in The Atlantic, "Canada Is Killing Itself," by Elaina Plott Calabro, should alarm New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is supposed to decide about legalizing assisted suicide in the Empire State before the end of the year.
Calabro's piece details several alarming incidents. One of them involves a doctor "assisting" a patient on a mattress on the floor. The doctor had to get on the floor to administer the poison that ended the patient's life. How undignified a death. The doctor's solution to this was not to find a way to make sure that people get the support they need to live. Instead, how about an unmarked facility with all the creature comforts you would want for your planned end?
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The Atlantic piece was published the same week the Little Sisters of the Poor were in the news again in the United States. Pennsylvania is determined to make the Catholic nuns provide employees with contraception and abortion-inducing drug coverage. It's gotten to the point of a cultural obsession. Here we have women dedicating their lives to God, doing the work few others will do. They care for the elderly poor.
My friend, Sister Constance Veit, told me that in her decades as a Little Sister, she has never witnessed a patient ask to be killed. Because they feel loved. Because their pain is medically treated. Because they feel their lives have value and they have a reason to live. Even as they are confined to a hospital bed, they may even consider their lives to be gifts, still, because they have more time to love and be loved.
In one story in The Atlantic piece, a patient wanted to die, until his family started visiting. When his family members realized their absence was driving him to suicide, they made some changes. It was a wake-up call. He no longer wanted to die.
The Beatles had the right idea. "All you need is love" might sound too simplistic for public policy, but it sure beats suicide. And it actually does reverse mindsets. The Atlantic is no pro-life rag. Mainstream, secular outlets are increasingly noticing the negative effects and spread of assisted suicide. And there will never be enough pajama parties in funeral homes or coffin-painting art therapy to make it anything other than bad policy, bad medicine and bad ethics.
And if I'm wrong, prepare our nations' coffins.
As long as we're still noticing, there's hope.
(Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review magazine and author of the new book "A Year With the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living." She is also chair of Cardinal Dolan's pro-life commission in New York, and is on the board of the University of Mary. She can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com.)
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