Actually I do support euthenasia for people. I certainly want to die
naturally rather than hooked up to machines and if I chose to want to die
because of pain, illness, quality of life-I would want to be "put to
sleep!"
Bertina
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Wed, 21 Oct 1998, bunny wrote:
> 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.
>
> Send us your comments ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). Please include your name,
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