Chuck Colson relates this chilling story from California:
In his new book, The Last Goodnights: Assisting My Parents with Their Suicides, lawyer and author John West publicly tells a story that most people would have kept silent. He does it so that one day others may be able to kill openly and without fear. That’s not how West puts it, of course, but I’m afraid that’s what it boils down to.
West’s parents were prestigious psychiatrists. As West wrote, “Neither was at all religious, but both had deep insight into the human condition. . . . And they knew what they wanted.”
What they wanted was to die “on [their] own terms.” When West’s father was diagnosed with cancer, he asked his son for help in taking his own life. In West’s mother’s case, “advancing cognitive decline” led her to fear that she would “turn into a bowl of Jell-O in her head.” A couple of weeks after West assisted his father’s suicide, his mother made the same request....
No good can come of allowing people to kill others—even if they claim they were acting out of the most purely humanitarian motives. The authorities need to uphold the law.
Make no mistake: Legalizing assisted suicide is a big step on a dangerous and slippery slope, especially in a world where human life is growing cheaper by the minute. We’ve already seen that legalizing assisted suicide has led to non-voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands. And we’ve talked recently on BreakPoint about how increasing health-care costs have spurred Britain to deny certain citizens life-prolonging treatment.
I will say it over and over, until I am blue in the face: Every human life, from conception through natural death, is sacred. And to take that life unjustly is simply murder—the kind of thing the state has a sworn duty to stop.
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