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From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: Euthanasia
Message-ID: <15700@handicap.news>
Date: 16 May 91 13:47:50 GMT
Sender: wtm@bunker.isc-br.com
Reply-To: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Organization: Covici Computer Systems
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Index Number: 15700

Russell.Hunt@f240.n620.z3.fidonet.org (Russell Hunt) writes:

> Im puzzled. In this part of the world euthanasia relates to people
> of sound mind making a conscious decision when faced with a
> prognosis which they choose not to live. Yet, most of this
> conversation focuses on a decision to cease life by someone else for
> an individual who can't express a view ie. coma.
> 
> Strange. Are the Australian and US usages of English so different.
> Inherrant in any such process is the expression of CONSCIOUS will.
> After all, if you don't own your own life who does?

Well, that's interesting.  We cannot create life, and I can't imagine 
that we own our lives; for if we did so, we could sell our lives and I need
not go into the moral consequences of that.

Euthanasia always involves the killing of another person.  You can call it
what you will, but through inaction or action the person is killed.

This is an abomination according to natural law and in our country we have
our declaration of independence which says "... that they are endowed by 
their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that amoung these are LIFE ...".

If that proposition is accepted, then it would seem that only the Creator
should be allowed to take that life away which he endowed in the first place
and that we should do nothing to change that decision (indeed I am certain
that we could not prolong a life if the Creator wants to terminate it).

Anyway, when you get right down to it euthanasia is just a fraud to kill
people whom the proponents of euthanasia would call "useless eaters" or 
they would say "lives not worthy to be lived, etc ...".

These are the same folks who would ration medical care, kill hundreds of 
thousands of Iraqis, put out reports that say that the world's population
should be REDUCED by billions, etc.  That's where this comes from and no 
where else.  These folks ration medical care and then when the people who
are on that inadequate care say that if they have to live like this, they
would rather die, these Malthusians will then say that that was a rational
decision of the person involved!!  What a lot of balloney!!