I love the New York Post editorials. None of this above the fray, on the one hand, on the other hand bothsidesism. You know exactly where the Post stands.
“Hochul absolutely has to kill the macabre doctor-assisted-suicide bill,” the October 12 editorial declares unequivocally.
“Gov. Kathy Hochul must resist the coming push to sign the so-called Medical Aid in Dying Act: New York doesn’t need to turn doctors into killers,” the editorial begins. “Fans of ‘assisted suicide’ pretend it’s purely about respecting the wishes of terminally ill patients seeking a dignified exit, but medicalized killing never stops there.”
There are plenty of other reasons to oppose turning the purpose of medicine on its head but these are two principal warning lights.
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I remember reading the following forty+ years ago, and it has remained with me ever since. It was written by anthropologist Margaret Mead, explaining the almost incomparable significance of the Hippocratic Oath
For the first time in our tradition there was a complete separation between killing and curing. Throughout the primitive world, the doctor and the sorcerer tended to be the same person. He with the power to kill had power to cure, including specially the undoing of his own killing activities. He who had the power to cure would necessarily also be able to kill…With the Greeks the distinction was made clear. One profession, the followers of Asclepius, were to be dedicated completely to life under all circumstances, regardless of rank, age or intellect – the life of a slave, the life of the Emperor, the life of a foreign man, the life of a defective child…
Mead rightly observed of this “priceless possession” that
[S]ociety always is attempting to make the physician into a killer – to kill the defective child at birth, to leave the sleeping pills beside the bed of the cancer patient…
Assisted suicide is the ultimate example of mission creep gone amuck. As the Post notes
Consider Canada, which in 2016 adopted a MAID measure just like what’s proposed in New York — and has kept on “liberalizing” the rules, to include non-terminal severe illness, with the current government now planning to expand MAID to cover purely psychological suffering in 2027.
Right now, MAID already accounts for one in 20 Canadian deaths.
And the macabre trade in organs harvested from MAID beneficiaries is now ramping up.
What will this bill do, if Hochul signs it? It will be
Opening the door to state-endorsed death of the most vulnerable, whether disabled, autistic, severely depressed or simply socially “unwanted.”
The editorial doesn’t stop there. Assisted suicide proponents always point to disingenuous opinion polls, but “Only a tiny sliver of the public actively wants this.”
As Robert Bellafiore, New York Catholic Conference spokesman, puts it: “If you asked 1,000 random New Yorkers for the top 20 things they want Governor Hochul to do, letting doctors help patients kill themselves wouldn’t even make the list.”
And, as is typically the case with these laws, New York’s proposed law has no waiting periods and no evaluation of the would-be suicides patient’s state of mind. It also has no residency requirement, so it would join those states which invite depressed people to come to die.
The Post editorial ends with this warning to Hochul, who is a Democrat.
Medical Aid In Dying belies every value of the traditional Democratic Party, which has always cared about the most vulnerable.
Hochul needs to steel her spine and kill this monstrous measure the instant it’s finally delivered to her desk.
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. He frequently writes Today’s News and Views — an online opinion column on pro-life issues.
