First, Do Harm

It’s doubly tragic that just days before Easter there’s need to address the appalling fact that more and more countries in the world, and a dozen states, now have laws that allow the killing of their citizens and residents.

This is in keeping with the infernal political trend to define “health care” as a system that results in the deliberate death of the patient. The vilest practices suggested in apocalyptic fiction of a generation or two ago are popular now.

There’s enough going on that you may have missed the story of Noelia Castillo Ramos. She was a 25-year-old Spanish woman. She suffered from mental issues even before her parents separated when she was 13, but it was the separation that caused the Catalan government to take control of her and place her in a state-run facility. She was gang-raped by three boys. (That sort of thing has become increasingly common in Europe, where it is more or less laughed off as “cultural differences.”)

Sexual assault by a gang of boys did not improve her mental health. Soon afterwards, she threw herself from the fifth floor of a building.

But it didn’t kill her. Nor, despite the widely circulated “reporting” in Spanish socialist newspapers (and later, American socialist newspapers), did it leave her paraplegic. It was hard for her to walk, but she underwent therapy and, as videos made at the time show, was happy to make progress.

The five-story fall didn’t improve her mental condition, either, and sometimes its effects and the difficulty of the therapy joined the repeated rapes in making her wish she was dead.

Enter the oh-so-modern government of Spain. They were quick to offer to kill her. And, it seems, to make a quick Euro from it.

“According to her lawyer, Noelia Castillo Ramos cannot change her mind about undergoing euthanasia because her organs are already committed,” it was reported (emphasis mine).”The hospital pressured for euthanasia because her organs were already committed,” said the lawyer.

You read that correctly. She was told that she couldn’t decide to live because others had already called dibs on her body parts, as if she were selling a house and decided not to move after all, after the papers had been signed.

So she was killed last Friday. Not “euthanized,” not “put to sleep.” Killed. Turned from a largely healthy but troubled young woman of 25 into a medical meat market. With everybody in the “supply chain” making money from it.

It may be even worse. Transplants require nice, fresh organs. We are told — it may be true, but I’m not convinced — that this usually happens after “brain death,” a phenomenon that is increasingly coming into question. There are forms of anesthesia in which the patient is not so much protected from as conscious but sedated, and the drugs involved prevent the patient remembering what happened. The goal is to make the patient not move during the surgery. I am given to understand that this kind of thing is common in medical killings in which the organs are to be “harvested” — nice euphemism, in a field filled with them. What’s more, the way to keep the desired organs healthy involves keeping the person — they say donor, I say victim — alive, too, breathing, heart beating. So it is likely that Noelia’s last experience of this life, the world’s parting shot at her, may have been even more ghastly than the events that made her sometimes want to die.

The “European Court of Human Rights” had no problem with any of it.

Meanwhile her rapists went unpunished, the best anyone can tell. Instead of killing the victim, the government would have been more dutiful had it undertaken something involving a small guillotine and, optionally, removal of items such that the criminals would forever be possessed of high voices. (If you criminally shoot someone you are forever prohibited from having firearms. Well . . .)

Someone close to me, who became a physician not to kill people but to make them better, phoned me one afternoon early in her career. She was shaken as I’d never heard her before. She had been assigned to “pull the plug” on a young accident victim who, as I understood it, had received head injuries such that he would never approach consciousness again, and in any case the decision had not been hers. “You would not believe how hard the human body fights to stay alive,” she said, crying. She had not killed him by any reasonable definition of the term — he had been about as alive as John F. Kennedy was when he was wheeled into Parkland Memorial Hospital, most of his brain lying on the gurney. But even at the most basic level, our bodies want to remain alive.

I do not think very highly of JFK’s nephew Bobby Kennedy Jr., and I think he’s utterly unqualified to be secretary of Health and Human Services but, hey, Donald Trump owed him a favor. Yet even a blind squirrel occasionally finds an acorn, and Kennedy found one last summer.

“Our findings show that hospitals allowed the organ procurement process to begin when patients showed signs of life, and this is horrifying,” Secretary Kennedy said in a news release. “The organ procurement organizations that coordinate access to transplants will be held accountable. The entire system must be fixed to ensure that every potential donor’s life is treated with the sanctity it deserves.” In short, an organ procurement company was “harvesting” organs before the patients, like Noelia, were done using them.

That’s a step away from “death with dignity,” as the latter-day Doctor Mengeles and their supporters style it. Having a doctor — or someone — bump you off is legal in 12 states. The greatest amount of knowledge comes to us from Canada, where euthanasia is not an exchange student program but a flat-out industry, legal now for a decade. As is always predicted, and as always turned out to be true, it has been horribly abused.

In Canada it is called “MAiD,” for “Medical Assistance in Dying.” (Don’t you just love the euphemism?) When it first went into effect, it was supposedly limited to those in abject agony who were soon to die anyway, literally “putting them out of their misery.” But over the years the standards have changed. It now is limited to those who want to die, or might have wanted to die at some point, or who can be talked into acquiescing to being killed. It results in about 5 percent of all deaths there.

And no, I’m not exaggerating.

The horror stories have come in a steady stream. “How Paralytic Drugs, Silenced Suffering, and Organ Harvesting Turn Euthanasia into a System of Industrialized Death,” is how one well researched article put it last summer.

In Canada, the government and “health care” community are actively looking for people they can kill. In an interview last week, Canadian combat veteran Kelsi Sheren spoke of another woman crippled in war who hoped to get a wheelchair ramp for her house.

“When Canada needed her to step up, she stepped up every time . . . and she just wanted a wheelchair ramp, and they asked her if she wanted to die instead,” says Sheren.

The interview went on to point out that “Some funeral homes are even capitalizing on these patients by offering their facilities as spaces where approved killings can take place. ‘They also handle the whole funeral and the crematory right there,’ says Sheren.”

David Brooks described the Canadian system in in The Atlantic three years ago, “As assisted suicide has become an established part of Canadian society, the complex moral issues surrounding the end of life have drifted out of sight. Decisions tend to be made within a bureaucratic context, where utilitarian considerations can come to dominate the foreground. Or as the president of the Quebec College of Physicians, which regulates medical practice in the province, put it, assisted suicide ‘is not a political or moral or religious issue. It is a medical issue.’ A materialist cost-benefit analysis, for some people, crowds out affirmations that life is sacred, and socioeconomic burdens weigh heavily in the balance.”

It has become such a common thing in Canada that nurse practitioners there complain about not being paid for ending the lives of “patients.” What does Canada pay you to kill someone? Not a lot, $50.35, but it’s easy work, and unless you’re selling the parts it doesn’t take long.

“MAiD is shifting the focus of medicine from the treatment of suffering to the elimination of the suffering patient,” writes Ramona Coelho. “This shift does not reflect the intentions of every clinician, but it reflects structural pressures that are increasingly shaping practice. Canada is approaching 100,000 MAiD deaths since legalization 10 years ago. That number marks a quiet but profound transformation in how medicine understands suffering, autonomy and its own purpose.”

Canadian medicine wants patients to die. Last week I read of a highly respected charity head in Canada who went to the doctor. He had a diabetic foot ulcer — something easily treated with antibiotics. He was offered death, which they could give him this afternoon. No, he said, he just had a sore on his foot. So he was scheduled for an appointment: a year later, by which time the ulcer had spread, become gangrenous, and now required his leg to be amputated.

A Vancouver woman, Miriam Lancaster, awakened with a sore back last April. She went to the hospital where she was immediately offered the opportunity to be put down — killed, not insulted. She said no, got better, and has enjoyed traveling ever since.

Oh, and if you decide you want to be killed and change your mind, you’ll be killed anyway, in Canada as well as Spain. Just ask Mrs. B. And in Canada, seasonal affective disorder can be a terminal condition.

Why would governments want to kill their citizens? Easy. It’s cheaper than keeping them alive. Which is why we can expect it to spread to wide adoption in the United States. Already we’re hearing about the cost of keeping old people around. Insurance companies want people to die and to be quick about it. That approach will grow louder. “Do you want your parents to spend your inheritance?” grown children will be told. There are those who argue that disabled people should be done away with (and those, thankfully, who disagree).

But our contempt for inconvenient lives grows. There is discussion — it is growing — of “duty to die,” the idea that you’re too burdensome or expensive to be kept alive. Leading the charge is England, a country hoping, and likely to succeed, to become the world leader in the field of bad ideas. But, hey, there’s big saving to a government if you’re dead rather than expensively ill.

I’ve just touched the surface here. If you do a little research on your own, you’ll be cast into a mood that in Canada would be sufficient to get you legally killed.

This column was suggested by my good friend Jim, who was rightfully outraged by the entirely unnecessary death at the hands of Spain’s socialist bureaucrats and their followers. Yeah, you might say, but that’s Spain. The U.S. is different.

Take a look at what our country has become and you’ll find cold comfort.

In my view, God decides when we live and when we die. I do wish He would weigh in with a little terrible swift sword action. It is probably wrong of me to say so.

Think a little about this as you have, as I hope you do, a happy and blessed Easter.