14. juli 2014

Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith, blogger på Catholic Herald, skriver bl.a.

We’re running out of cash to care for a rising number of elderly people. That is why we are talking about ‘assisted dying’

Now that Lord Carey has changed his mind on so-called “assisted dying” we can expect a great deal of discussion on the matter, and an emerging consensus that Lord Falconer’s Bill is a good thing. It is almost certain to pass in some form or another. The United Kingdom will soon be a place where those who wish to end their lives will have the right to do so, and those who help them (if help is the word) will not face prosecution. This is a deeply depressing prospect.

Lord Carey mentions several hard cases that he says have helped him change his mind, but hard cases make bad law. The hard case is often invoked to bring about a change in the law, and that change opens up the prospect of other less hard cases making use of the same law, until eventually we end up like Belgium, which has recently legalised child euthanasia, that is, euthanasia for those who cannot make an informed decision.

This argument is often dismissed as a thin end of the wedge argument, but has there ever been a country where a restrictive law on a matter of human life has not eventually become a permissive law? “Safe, legal and rare”? How hollow those words seem now.

I am disappointed by Lord Carey’s intervention, and consider him to be profoundly mistaken. His talk of compassion towards the dying is misleading. Yes, we must have compassion to those in pain, and we must do all we can to relieve their pain. But, as Pope Francis recently said (in Evangelii Gaudium, number 214): “It is not progressive to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life.”

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