Assisted suicide - its chilling reality

Good letter in today's National Post:

Re: Euthanasia Makes Us All Complicit, Andrew Coyne, April 19.In his book, Other People’s Lives: Reflections on Medicine, Ethics and Euthanasia, Richard Fenigsen wrote that, “In Holland, the country much praised for its practice of voluntary euthanasia, the lives of 400 disabled newborns are terminated every year by denial of medical assistance, dehydration/starvation and lethal injections. The reports of government-ordered studies revealed that lethal injections are given to 1,000 gravely ill persons who had never asked for death, but have a “low quality of life” or “no prospect of improvement;” some were killed “because the families could not take it anymore” or even because their beds were needed. Thus, along with the voluntary euthanasia that is going on, we witness the extermination of persons who embarrass their families, are undesirable for society, or arbitrarily judged unfit by doctors.

In a society, the ones who are in most need of protection are infants, children, the aged, the weak, the infirm and the marginalized. We are slowly turning into a society that, under guise of constitutional guarantees of freedom, autonomy and self-determination, is riding the slippery slope of exterminating the very people who need our protection the most. 

Cynthia Robles, Mississauga, Ont.