Date sent: Wed, 21 Oct 1998 13:50:04 +0800
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From: bunny <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: STUDIES IN WOMEN AND ENVIRONMENT <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: PUTTING PEOPLE TO SLEEP
The sparing of suffering towards the end of a terminal illness
through euthanasia is one of the few instances in which we treat
animals better than humans - even in the cases where the humans
(unlike animals, who are incapable of doing so) are literally begging
and pleading for someone to help them die and grant them surcease
form the type of intolerable, intractable and hopeless pain none of
us would ever want to endure, but any of us might be legally forced
through. I speak from personal experience; a grandmother of mine
died that way, of stomach cancer, at the age of 93, before my
horrified eyes. You really don't want to read the poem I had to
write to exorcize that experience. Joe
Joe
> Editorial in the New York Post, 10-16-98
>
> PUTTING PEOPLE TO SLEEP
>
>
> There is a saying that once you treat animals like
> people, you are more likely to treat people like
> animals. That seems as good a way as any to begin a
> discussion of a local veterinarian's misguided
> effort at
> assisted suicide.
>
> Some people are dismayed that Marco Zancope, the
> vet in question, has been charged by the Manhattan
> DA's office with second-degree manslaughter. After
> all, it seems clear that the young victim, Cara
> Beigel,
> was a woman in agonizing pain from terminal
> inflammatory breast cancer.
>
> But there is a very good reason why assisted
> suicides
> like this are against the law: There could not be a
> better example of a slippery slope that leads
> inexorably to murder on a nightmarish scale.
>
> The temptation to play God and deem someone else's
> life not worth living is one that has proved
> overwhelming - and corrupting - again and again. It
> both predates and explains the ancient Hippocratic
> Oath, which enjoins doctors from taking life.
>
> Remember the Nazis' mercy killings of the mentally
> and physically handicapped and how those horrors
> were expanded to include millions said to have
> no right
> to live?
>
> Once you allow even good, honest, sensible doctors -
> the kind who cannot be influenced by the greedy
> relatives of wealthy patients - to decide that a
> human
> life doesn't meet their criteria of quality, you put
> uncounted human lives in terrible danger.
>
> Of course, Zancope isn't even a physician; he's
> a vet.
> And that adds a more sinister cast to this whole
> case.
> After all, vets are hardened death-dealers: They put
> animals to sleep all the time.
>
> Even if putting an animal to sleep is called humane,
> human life is rightly treated differently from
> animal life,
> by everyone except the animal rights extremists
> (generally misanthropes who prefer animals to
> people).
>
> Of course, Zancope may just be a friend who
> happened to have access to barbiturates in lethal
> quantities. He may have acted from the best of
> motives. But a society must hold human life sacred.
> And that means no one, however well-intentioned, can
> be allowed to do what he did without an expectation
> of prosecution and imprisonment.
>
> Copyright (c) 1998, N.Y.P. Holdings, Inc.
>
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