The Left loves its phony narratives and I’ve taken aim at several of them. Today I take aim at ‘death with dignity’, the phony narrative the Left uses to sell assisted suicide and euthanasia.
I start with the spectacular story out of the Netherlands in 2019 where a court upheld the actions of a doctor who euthanized a woman with dementia against her wishes. The doctor put sedatives in the woman’s coffee and had the family hold her down for the lethal injection. The woman put up a fight. Doesn’t sound like a very dignified death to me.
And it wasn’t very dignified what happened to the brother of a friend of mine. The brother had his third stroke and was sedated. His wife violated his written instructions by stopping all treatment and withdrawing all food and water. The wife was heard to say she was tired of dealing with the situation and it’s also true the sooner he died, the more she stood to inherit. A financial motive – how dignified is that?
To these two ugly stories, we can now add a third. A palliative care nurse recently published the story you are about to hear so “eyes will be opened to the horrifying reality of euthanasia”:
They say euthanasia is a compassionate, dignified way to die. They say everyone should have the option, and that a life with suffering is not a life worth living. But that’s not what I’ve seen. I know Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) to be messier and more distressing than anyone cares to talk about.
Laura had picked out music to play in the background while she died, and had chosen which loved ones she wanted by her side. It was planned for 6 pm. She was alert and oriented, and had signed a waiver saying that if for whatever reason she was no longer judged to be of sound mind at the time of the MAID provision, she could be euthanized anyways. She thought she had complete control. Just a few hours before 6 pm Laura had a completely unexpected grand mal seizure. She wouldn’t stop seizing and required large doses of a sedating anticonvulsant. The time of the provision came, and she was confused and groggy from the sedating medication, and unable to properly confirm she wanted the euthanasia, or say goodbye to her family members. She tried to speak but no one could understand what she was saying. Laura was euthanized at 6 pm, according to the waiver she had signed. This was what she had requested, but the family came out of her room shaking, with eyes wide. They cried, and kept saying it should have never happened that way. They had no closure. There was no dignified, peaceful ending. Just their loved one, killed in the middle of trying to say something…. (H)er death was sudden, and traumatic, and the family went home right after without anyone to support them through the process…. (A) coworker sped out of the room shaking and crying,
I know multiple other nurses who have been through the same experience. Although they had no religious or moral objections to MAID, after witnessing it first hand they swore to never be in the room again while it happened. They were deeply unsettled, and their conscience told them what they couldn’t admit to themselves: the intentional ending of a life is wrong, no matter the circumstances.
Patients may think that choosing MAID relieves their family of the burden of waiting for their death, or seeing suffering. But in reality it steals time and closure, and replaces a natural process with an unsettling ending. From what I have seen, loved ones of euthanized patients appear to struggle more in their grief than loved ones of patients who die naturally.
Welcome to the wacky world of the Left, where ‘death with dignity’ means people being killed against their wishes, for unsavory motives like money. Where the vendors selling assisted suicide are not killers. Where the real cause of death – assisted suicide – is kept off death certificates. Where death is considered ‘medical treatment‘ and medicine means a ‘substance to cause death’. Where doctors pushassisted suicide on vulnerable patients, elder abuse is common, agonizing deaths routinely occur from lethal drugs that don’t work as advertised, destructive social contagion takes over, and people are taught all of this is good when it could not be more evil.
If this is ‘death with dignity’, you can keep it.
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