A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Dutch euthanasia spreads from “terminally” ill to mentally ill and others May 16, 2016

How far a leap is it from “permitting” the murder of the sick and the old, and requiring it?  The slippery slope is a legitimate fallacy in logic, but some slopes are indeed slippery, especially when it comes to the amoral shibboleths of the Left.

At any rate, from using ostensibly incurable cancer and other painful diseases as permissible justifications for murder, the Netherlands has now advanced to using mental illness or lasting reaction to trauma. Will it be long before being simply yet another bored soul in our infinitely-sated culture will provide sufficient merit for state-sanctioned murder?  I ask only half in jest:

…..The latest figures show that last year 5,516 Dutch people — including children — were legally killed by lethal injection administered by doctors trained to do the task with rapid efficiency……[which is over 100 times the number of state executions annually in the US, which executions are entirely consistent with Catholic moral doctrine, in general terms.  But where is the hue and cry for the abolition of this form of state-sanctioned death?]

…….Jackie wants to die by euthanasia, too. This follows a traumatic childhood experience when she was sexually abused at five years old and developed depression as a result……[My personal experience is that those subject to sex abuse as children never fully recover.  They are never quite “right.”  But in spite of this woman’s suffering, choosing to die is false release and gravely offensive to God.]

……

Details of the controversial case were released by the Dutch authorities this week in an effort to prove to critics of the country’s liberal euthanasia laws that doctors only carry it out under strict guidelines.

The process involves a patient submitting a request to die to a doctor who, in turn, must agree they are in a medically hopeless condition, suffering ‘unbearably’, either physically or — contentiously — mentally. Above all, they must have no hope of improvement.

The request then goes to an ethics committee which makes a decision, normally within a week. [So, find one crooked doctor and get his recommendation rubber-stamped by a favorable committee……that’s sufficient review for the taking of a human life?  Using the death penalty analogy again, there are always numerous reviews, appeals, and interventions, to the extent that the process takes years.  And here, find a quack and a week later you’re approved to die?!?  Wow……..what a robust process.]

……..Currently, 4 per cent of the 140,000 or so deaths a year in Holland are the result of doctor-assisted suicide and the tally is rising. [Put another way, Holland’s death rate is 4% higher than it need be.  You could say that over 5000 people were allowed/encouraged to kill themselves or have themselves killed.  And just how unbiased are the advocacy groups that often perform the killings themselves?  Can no one see that people with likely treatable illnesses are being killed by the macabre, demonic advocates of “euthanasia?”]

In particular, increasing numbers of Dutch people with mental illness demand euthanasia. In 2010, two people with such conditions had their lives ended with the figure increasing to 56 last year.

Of those deaths, 36 were conducted by doctors from Amsterdam’s End Of Life clinic which has a lengthy waiting list and sends mobile euthanasia teams across Holland to help patients die in their own homes……. [As I mentioned, biased advocacy groups, who can also, by their own admission (not excerpted), assign friendly physicians to recommend suicide-murder for the poor lost souls]

……..Ms Stärcke showed a film featuring the family of a Dutch woman with post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic depression and a personality disorder, who — aged just 34 — chose euthanasia even though her own daughter was a toddler aged only three. She explained that the little girl was living with her father, whom her mother had divorced.After the woman’s euthanasia, her toddler daughter attended her mother’s funeral. [And the cycle of horrific childhood trauma yielding gravely wounded souls, souls disposed perhaps even to this total rejection of God and the gift of life, continues.  Poor little girl. THIS IS WHAT COMES FROM A SOCIETY THAT HAS TOTALLY REJECTED GOD. Without belief in God, existence is pointless.  I can find no better worse example of the diabolical narcissism that permeates our culture than this]

Ms Stärcke says that she was sure that the woman ‘would commit suicide if I didn’t help her to die’……. [The article also notes that many of these people have “numerous” past failed suicide attempts.  But why were they failed?  Were they failed because the attempt was more a cry for help than a real attempt at ending one’s life?  Here we have yet more evidence that the presence of euthanasia advocacy and an environment that encourages suicide/murder is creating a culturally acceptable means for disturbed people to die.  That is to say, it’s a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy]

……..Research shows that 70 per cent of those with psychiatric problems which the Dutch clinic helps to die are women. A quarter of them are under 50.

Many of the clinic’s mentally-ill patients — male ones, too — have already tried to commit suicide on numerous occasions, and more than 30 per cent have been refused help to die by doctors in the past, often because that desire may be linked to their psychiatric disorder.

Earlier this week, alarm bells sounded in Britain when the Mail revealed details of the young Dutch sex abuse victim’s decision to die in her 20s. [And you can see the degree to absurdity to which this will reach.  How can it be declared that someone in their 20s is incurable?!?]

As I said above, this vast murder racket is directly related to the death of faith in the Christian God.  Even more, it is an unavoidable outcome of the kind of pointless, materialist, Godless existence the modern sexular pagan progressive state posits.

The Netherlands has long been a cultural bellwether for Europe and most of the West.  What cultural atrocities they permit or encourage eventually spread to many other nations.  This is simply one of many forms of the cultural suicide the leftist-inspired diabolical narcissism overtaking our culture has brought to the fore.  The Netherlands leads in this series of cultural degradations due to its being one of the most thoroughly secularized countries in the world.  Sad to say, the Church in Holland has done very little to stop, or even strongly oppose, this process.  To some degree, the Dutch Church, thoroughly radicalized and infested with modernism, has helped bring about these seemingly unstoppable tendencies towards collapse.

Lord have mercy on these poor lost souls.  It is very easy to say “suck it up” from afar when one is dealing with unending, nightmarish pain, but that is what many Saints have done, and that is who we are called to emulate.  It is the death of the day-to-day, lived Catholic Faith that has caused the redemptive value of suffering to be entirely forgotten in the West today.  People who regard Jesus Christ as an ancient fairy tale find nothing in this world that can sustain them through their trial.

It’s monstrously sad, but this is just one particular example of where the death of faith leads.  The endarkened new paganism many elites want to visit on the former Christendom will not bring a post-Christian rationalist nirvana into existence, but a horrific new barbarism made far worse by the technology available.

Lord, have mercy on all of us.