Elderly told to welcome euthanasiam by Linda Everett Within days of one another, the Londo

Elderly told to welcome euthanasiam
by Linda Everett

Within days of one another, the London  the
"prestigious'' journal of moral indifferentism of Adam
Smith's free enterprise economics, and the  mouthpiece for the U.S. Eastern Liberal
Establishment, have called for the sick and elderly to
submit themselves to the "dignity'' of Nazi [sic] euthanasia.

	In an editorial entitled, "A time to die: Immortality
is a bad thing, there are nobler aims for medicine,'' the
 complains that doctors spend too much effort
on keeping old people alive. "Medicine,'' the editors say,
``has increased the quantity of life far beyond its
capacity to preserve the quality of it, and a greater
proportion of old age is now spent in chronic illness and
misery.'' Divulging a fierce hatred of medical
accomplishments in the United States, the editors gripe,
"The average life expectancy of an American man has risen
remarkably, from just under 60 in the late 1920s to 76 in
1984. That is a big blessing for some, but only a mixed
one for many others. Just as an extension of credit is no
guarantee of the ability to pay, so an extension of life
is no guarantee of the ability to enjoy it. Hospitals are
full of people who are tragically overdrawn. For such
people, the last weeks, days and hours are often the
worst.'' 
	The  speaking in the tradition of another
18th-century British apologist for genocide, Jeremy
Bentham, goes on, brazenly lying: "No calculating
utilitarian, applying Bentham's cold arithmetic of
pleasure versus pain, can demand that the old be killed or
starved to death to save money for the young. It is the
old themselves who, for their own dignity and out of
concern for their successors, must learn to demand less of
the court physicians.... When a person (or his relatives)
can see that a biography is finished, it is not for the
doctors to try to write a painful extra chapter.'' 
	The cruel irony here, is the fact that Britain's
national health care system does indeed help patients die.
The United Kingdom rations health care utilizing a
treatment selection criterion based on employability and
age. Their policy is clear: Patients are not  to
treatment. The fact that a reliable life-saving treatment
exists does not imply that a person who will die without
it has a right to receive it. Elderly patients who are
routinely denied life-saving dialysis and hip surgery, can
neither choose to receive (or ``demand,'' as the
 puts it) nor choose to refuse medical care.
Thus, the  has signaled to the national system
as well as to patients' families, that the elderly of
Great Britain are to be targeted as a class, for another
racheting downwards of the health care. It is not just
triage, but genocide which they demand. 

                 - `Rational' suicide -
	The s Aug. 15 cover story of its
Health section, "Is It Time for Mercy Killing?'' shows a
similar affinity for a new Final Solution for the sick and
elderly. Written by the s self-proclaimed "patient
advocate'' Victor Cohn, it uses the same arguments to
legitimize "rational'' suicide for those "suffering dying
and comatose dying, ;oband;cb those who consciously or
unconsciously await the release of death,'' as 
magazine of Moscow did in a recent feature on mercy
killing. Cohn is pushing murder, pure and simple. In fact,
in an interview with  he admitted that he would
consider murder--``If I saw a suffering person.'' He uses
the lying premises of top euthanasia advocates in his
article: "Assisted Suicide--Is It Acceptable?''; "Saving
Lives, Ending Lives--Doctors Confront a Mercy Killing'';
"Story of Debbie's Death Isn't Over.'' 
	The article reviews all the prestigious "experts'' who
seek to legitimize Nazi medical murder in the United
States. Last year, George Lundberg, editor of the  published an anonymous essay, "It's
Over Debbie,'' in which a young doctor strolls into a
hospital room and administers a lethal dose of medication
to take a young cancer patient out of her pain and out of
her life. There are others, like Marcia Angell, physician
and executive editor of the  who in last November's issue
of the journal endorsed a call by Right to Die Society
physicians to help patients die. Angell says the killing of patients should
be legalized. Recently she told Cohn, "I think perhaps
we're ready to consider euthanasia in very controlled
circumstances. There could be some problems. But the
alternative is so horrible.'' 
	Other than death pills and lethal injections, Cohn
works to legitimize killing brain-damaged patients like
Nancy Cruzan, whose parents will demand U.S. Supreme Court
permission this October to starve her to death. 
	Cohn is too astute about how cost-cutting both in
managed health care and in Medicare work to deny treatment and nursing care
to the elderly, forcing them into impoverishment and
despondency, not to know that it is a contributary factor
to the rising suicide rate of elderly people. Yet, he lies
and says those suicides, along with "increased medicated
survival'' and rigged opinion polls allegedly showing
support for assisted suicide, are all reasons to kill
patients. 
	We have to ask the  and the  how
much "choice'' do the elderly have, when faced with a
nation telling them the only "dignity'' they'll receive is
in "choosing'' death?