Just days after France legalized “assisted suicide,” the French government has now ruled that doctors can euthanize a conscious patient against his wishes by withdrawing life-sustaining treatment, even though he repeatedly says he wants to live.
The bombshell ruling has intensified fears that France’s euthanasia regime is already sliding toward a system in which doctors, not patients, ultimately decide who lives and who dies.
At the center of the case is Rémi, a man who regained consciousness after a devastating accident and now consistently tells doctors and his family that he wants to continue living after getting a second chance at life.
I can’t say I anticipated exactly this course forward for the Apostles of Death. But tell me, Gentle Reader: doesn’t it make a demonic kind of sense? France has legally codified the notion that doctors, not the patient being sustained nor his family, can rule an ongoing course of life-sustaining treatment “disproportionate:”
Hospital physicians nevertheless concluded that continuing treatment would merely prolong [Rémi’s] life without any realistic prospect of meaningful recovery.
They invoked France’s Claeys-Leonetti Act, which governs end-of-life medical decisions for the nation’s socialized healthcare system.
The act permits doctors to discontinue treatment they deem medically futile or disproportionate.
Merely being alive and conscious and wanting to remain that way is considered insufficient to override the doctors’ judgment.
“He who pays the fiddler calls the tune.” France’s socialist medical system makes the State the paymaster. Rémi, a mere citizen of the Republic, is subordinate to the will of the State. Indeed, the decision that confirmed the doctors’ “collegial judgment” said so explicitly:
France’s Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court, has now sided with the doctors.
In one of the ruling’s most alarming declarations, the court stated that “the patient’s wishes are subject to the law.”
We don’t have that kind of medical system in these United States… yet. But the penetration of third-party payment – insurance, Medicare, Medicaid – into medical decisions has reached a depth that makes the complete federalization of medical care likely, owing to the many clashes between patients in need of expensive care and insurance companies’ focus on their loss ratios. Under such circumstances, the demand for “correction” will swell. How far, we cannot know in advance.
We’ve already had the worldwide legalization of abortion. The demand for the legalization of euthanasia and “assisted suicide” is spreading; it’s already won in nine European nations. We’ve heard about the Groningen Protocol, too. A helpless woman has been starved to death legally, by the decision of her estranged husband. And now in France, a helpless, severely injured man will lose his life by the decisions of physicians, with the concurrence of the State.
In one of my most contentious essays, which was stimulated by the starvation-to-death of a helpless woman, I wrote:
Were a condemned serial killer to be sentenced to the same ordeal, every civil-rights and humanist group in the country would be up in arms. Nay, it would arouse every such group in the world. Such groups cannot abide the death penalty even for men convicted of the most heinous crimes. The United States would be castigated in every organ known to Man for its callousness, its brutality, and its lack of respect for human life.
So never, ever imagine that “It can’t happen here.” It already has. Those of us whom age is steadily rendering ever less capable of caring for ourselves are in more danger than we might know.
When the late, great Joseph Sobran wrote that “The State should not deliberately kill,” I was troubled. I had the usual rationales in mind: war and the most heinous of crimes. I’d accepted H. L. Mencken’s observation that the lives of some demonstrably vicious men were “incompatible with the reasonable safety of the rest of us.” I still struggle with those arguments. But Sobran was right, as he nearly always was. Once you have admitted the deliberate infliction of death to the laws and morals of your country, you’re aboard a train on a single, unalterable track. The terminus of your journey is plain.
Pray.
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