Euthanasia as a solution for Health Care Rationing

I encourage you to read the entire article (blog). The statements are backed by corroborating articles.

Quotes:

“I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.” The Hippocratic Oath

“Over 50% of Dutch physicians admitted to practicing euthanasia, most often on cancer patients. Only 60% kept written records of their euthanasia practice and only 29% filled out death certificates honestly in euthanasia cases…”

While that statistic alone was alarming, I then confirmed that “Only half of Dutch doctors report euthanasia, report says.” In 2001, the study focused on 5500 deaths, of which 41% to 54% of those cases were patients that had been euthanized.

Proponents of the practice will rally to say that these cases provided a humane ending for individuals suffering chronic pain, with terminal illnesses, who chose to end their lives under their own terms. But that, it turns out, is not always true.

80% of Dutch now support euthanasia, in a nation that, during World War II, resisted Nazi orders to euthanize patients, actions that later resulted in the hanging deaths of Nazi “war criminals”.

But today, the practice is so widely accepted, doctors have begun to euthanize many others. In his article, “The Dutch way of Death” (2001), Richard Miniter points out that, in 1990 alone, of the 130,000 Dutchmen who died, 11,800 were “killed or helped to die” by their doctors. An estimated 5,981 people were killed by their doctors WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT—according to the Dutch government.

But if that was not shocking enough, prepare yourself: “other groups that are put to death involuntarily: disabled infants, terminally ill children and mental patients. Some 8% of all infants who die in the Netherlands are killed by their doctors, according to a 1997 study published in the Lancet, a British medical journal.”

These facts prompted the Catholic Association of Doctors and Nurses to issue a statement protesting the decision of Groningen University Hospital to euthanize children under 12 when their pain is “intolerable, or if they have an incurable illness.”
“The ‘decision proposes a death solution in situations which could be addressed by modern palliative care”, and “raises the suspicion of a financial interest of the public authorities, since it decreases the 'burden' of prolonged and expensive care in clinical conditions for which any extension of life duration is considered meaningless.’ The association continues; ‘it opens the door on a national scale to the 'mercy killing' of other mentally incompetent persons, to be eliminated without their consent for reasons based on an external appreciation of their quality of life."
In “Now They Want to Euthanize Children” Wesley J. Smith explains that, “In the Netherlands, 31 percent of pediatricians have killed infants. A fifth of these killings were done without the ‘consent’ of parents.”
“In 30 years Holland has moved from assisted suicide to euthanasia, from euthanasia of people who are terminally ill to euthanasia of those who are chronically ill, from euthanasia for physical illness to euthanasia for mental illness, from euthanasia for mental illness to euthanasia for psychological distress or mental suffering, and from voluntary euthanasia to involuntary euthanasia or as the Dutch prefer to call it ‘termination of the patient without explicit request’.
It is now considered a form of discrimination against the chronically ill to deny them assisted death because they will be forced to suffer longer than those who are terminally ill and it is considered bias to force endurance of psychological pain when it is not associated with physical illness. The next step, non-voluntary euthanasia, is then justified by appealing to our social duty to care for patients who are not competent to choose for themselves.”