Unnatural Death: Medicine’s Descent from Healing to Killing with Richard Weikart

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:23):
And welcome to another edition of the handcom Plug podcast,
a podcast that is absolutely devoted to bringing the most interesting,
informative and inspirational people on the planet directly to your earbuds.
And as I always say on this podcast, if you
enjoy the podcast, please subscribe, rate and review. It helps

(00:45):
a lot. Today I want to talk about a subject
that I have been reading about in mass I mean
everywhere I see this subject coming up and fortune my
son David brought me a book not long ago that
deals specifically, emphatically, cogently with the issue that is the

(01:13):
subject of today's podcast. The book is titled Unnatural Death.
It's subtitled Medicine's Descent from Healing to Killing. It's written
by Richard Witkaart, who is no stranger to the ministry
of the Christian Research Institute. He is a professor of

(01:37):
history at California State University. He is an author. He's
written all kinds of really important books. I think of
the book from Darwin to Hitler, or the book The
Death of Humanity another Darwinian race. His doctoral dissertation was

(02:04):
on socialist Darwinism, and by the way, that book earned
the biennial Prize of the Forum for History of Human
Sciences as the best dissertation in that field. That's quite
a commendation. He has a contributed to the Christian Research Journal,

(02:28):
and he is a brilliant writer. He has the capacity
to take the complex, make it simple, digestible, so you
can translate that information to your children, to the people
within your sphere of influence. His latest book, the book
we're going to be talking about again today, is called
Unnatural Death and it is available through the Ministry of

(02:50):
the Christian Research Institute. You can check it out on
the web at equipped dot or gore. You can write
me a post office box eighty five hundred, Charlotte, North Carolina,
zip code two qu eight two seven to one, available
to anyone who stands shoulder to shoulder with us in
the battle for life and truth. It is an absolute
honor and pleasure to have you with us, doctor.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
Wikart, wonderful to be here with you.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
Yeah, so what caused you to put pen to paper
and start writing this book?

Speaker 3 (03:22):
Well, actually, I've been involved in research on this issue
for quite some time. My book From Darwin to Hitler
that you mentioned that came out in two thousand and
four broached this subject as well dealing with the German situation.
The way I got actually into it in that case
was kind of a roundabout way too, because when I
was looking at the impacts of Darwinism on culture and

(03:46):
intellectual life in Germany in the late nineteenth century, I
noticed that there were some thinkers who were promoting youth
in Asia. Aarons tackled the leading German Darwinist, for example,
was one of the key figures who was promote euthanasia,
killing of people with disabilities, as well as assistant suicide
in the late nineteenth early twentieth century. And then I

(04:08):
happened to read a book by James Rachels, who was
an American philosopher, and his book is called Created from Animals,
The Moral Implications of Darwinism, And in that book he
argues that because of Darwin, because Darwinism he believes, undermines
the Judeo Christian sanctity of life ethic. Therefore he thinks

(04:28):
that abortune, infanticide, euthanasia are all morally permissible. And that
kind of brought my attention because I then realized there
was a connection between these German ideas that I was
reading about these historical ideas and the connections with Darwinian
thinking and then the euthanasia ideas that are around today.
And if you look at not just James Rachel's who's

(04:50):
not quite as well known as figures like Peter Singer.
Peter Singer is very close in his ideology as well,
also believes that Darwinism undermined the Judeo Christian sank city
of life ethic and thus allows for euthanasia and infanticide
and assistant suicide and such. And so that's how I
got into this theme, actually by looking at the history

(05:11):
of Darwinism, and then as I expanded, I looked at
other issues as well. In my book Death of Humanity
that came out in twenty sixteen, I looked at a
whole host of secular philosophies that have arisen since the
Enlightenment period. What have you wrote to the Judeo Christian
sanctity of life ethic, thus bringing on culture where we
have acceptance of abortion and infanticide and euthanasia and such,

(05:34):
and so this book sort of takes off from that.

Speaker 1 (05:36):
Yeah, a lot to unpack there. You used a lot
of terminology, and sometimes I think we get confused by
the words themselves. I think you mentioned assistant suicide, voluntary euthanasia,
non voluntari euthanasia, involuntary euthanasia, passive euthanasia. Help us with understanding,
so we have a basic grid by which we can

(05:59):
continue on in this podcast and people will understand what
you're talking about when you talk about any one of
those particular categories.

Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yeah, a great point, Okay.

Speaker 3 (06:08):
Euthanasia is where another person, what's a person to death
and it can be for a variety of reasons, and
it could be either voluntary that is, the person asks
for killed, so that'd be physician assisted killing or euthanasia.
And by the way, that's legal in Canada and Netherlands

(06:30):
and Belgium and such. That would be voluntary euthanasia. There
is involuntary euthanasia, which is killing someone against their will.
That would be like what the Nazis did in the
nineteen late and early nineteen forties in killing people with disabilities.
Now the involuntary, there's also what's called nonvoluntary that's sort

(06:51):
of between those two, where the person is in a
coma or something where they can't give their consent for
one reason or another, and the decision is made for
them by someone else. Assistant suicide is where the person
who wants to die has to actually themselves administer a
fatal dose of medicine or whatever it is. Usually the assistants.

(07:13):
Usually euthanasia is done by a physician with an injection.
Assisted suicide usually is done through pills and is prescribed
by in physician. Assistant suicide, which is what usually has
done in the United States, we have that in ten states.
Oregon was the first state to legalize assisted suicide. Euthanasia,

(07:34):
by the way, is not legal anywhere in the United
States yet. Hopefully we'll stay that way and hopefully assistant
suicide only be.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Backed up too.

Speaker 3 (07:42):
But assistant suicide is legal in ten states in the
United States. That's where the person has to themselves take
the description, but again it's prescribed by a doctor. A
physician has to prescribe it for them. Now, there's actually
a different situation in Switzerland too. Switzerland is kind of
a different situation there because there are non physicians that

(08:04):
give euthanasia in Switzerland. In Switzerland, because of their legal system,
there's no prohibition on assisted suicide or helping someone to
die as long as you're not benefiting financially from it,
and so Switzerland has become a place to sort of
a place where what some people refer to as suicide burism.

(08:27):
So people sometimes will go from other parts of the
world its Switzerland to be killed and put to death.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
There a couple of terms euthanasia. I mean denotatively, it
sounds like it has a good vibe.

Speaker 3 (08:43):
Yeah, And actually the word euthanasia comes from the term
good death. The eu is the Greek word that means
good and thanatas is the Greek word for death. So
euthanasia actually originally meant good death. And in the early
nineteenth century and earlier, the word euthanasia was used to

(09:03):
essentially mean a physician helping a person manage pain, you know,
be more comfortable in their dying. It didn't mean hastening
their death, which is what it means today. In the
late nineteenth century, that word shift in meaning where it
actually meant causing them to die, hastening their death, rather

(09:24):
than just helping them to have comfort in their death.

Speaker 1 (09:28):
So words and phrases are not unifical, they're equivocal. It
really depends on the meaning that you pour into the word.
And the word euthanasia has gone through transition over time.

Speaker 2 (09:40):
Oh sure.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
And you know what happens is with these words. These
words get commandeered. And the reason they get commandeered is
because people want to put a good spin on what
they're doing. And so you get things, you know, compassion
and choices. That's one of the names of one of
the euthanasia organizations that's promoting euthanasia. They want to see
it as a compassionate thing. They want to sort of,

(10:03):
you know, basically hijack Euthanasian assisted suicide and claim that
this is the compassionate, the loving thing to do for them.
And so they want to portray it that way. So
they try to use words that will give that kind
of meaning. So in Canada, you know what is euthanasia,
They don't call it euthanasia. They call it medical assistance.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
In dyeing m aid made. That's what it's called in Canada.

Speaker 3 (10:26):
Yeah, So so they take these terms to try to
make it sound better than it really is. The word
suicide actually, interestingly, was a similar way. The word suicide
was introduced in the seventeenth century. Before that time, the
English word for what we call today suicide was self murder.
That was the term that was used for self murder.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
So a note that you make very careful distinctions, one
that actually I was not that aware of until I
read your book. And that's why parenthetically, I really advise
everyone listening to this podcast to get this book is
available for anyone who stands shoulder to shoulder with us
in the battle for life and truth. The thing that

(11:08):
caught my attention is passive euthanasia. You make distinct. Not
all passive euthanasia is alike.

Speaker 3 (11:16):
Yeah, there's there. Depends on the motive. That's the key issue.
And you know, this is something that's interesting because a
lot of euthanasia and assistant suicide advocates will claim that,
you know, passive euthanasia is the same thing, and so
it doesn't mean, you know, since we allow people to die,
you know, it's okay to turn off their ventilator or

(11:37):
turn off the machine that's keeping them alive. And everyone,
basically all bioethicists, you know, even the staunchest, you know,
most hardline Catholic or fundamentalist or whatever, you know, you know,
all bioethicists agree that turning off someone's ventilator, if their
situation is hopeless, is not a violation of ethics and morality,

(12:00):
and so a lot of youth and ASIA advocates will say, well,
it's the same thing. You know, giving them an injection
is basically the same thing, because you're causing death either way.
But the issue really comes down to intent. And here's
why that's important. Because when a person is turning off
a person's ventilator, for example, when they're at the end

(12:22):
of their life and their body can't sustain their functions
any longer, they're not doing it with the at least,
or it shouldn't be doing it with the purpose of
wanting that person to die. I want that person to die.
I'm wanting to end their life, and so I'm going
to do that to end their life. No, they're turning
off the ventilator just in the realization that it's fruitless
and hopeless to keep their body functioning. And you lament

(12:46):
their death, but you're not wanting it to end. And
in fact, if when you turned off that ventilator their
body kept functioning, you would rejoice, you know, you'd be
glad that that happened. In fact, interestingly, that has actually
happened in cases that have been taken to court where
people's ventilators have been turned off. Sometimes their bodies keep
the bodies keep functioning, they keep breathing on their own

(13:07):
and they don't die right away. And that's a person
who's turning off the ventilator. That to them would be
a good outcome. But when you're giving someone euthanasia, the
intent is to kill or assistant suicide, same thing. The
intent is to kill, and that intent is to bring
it about as quickly as possible at that particular point.

(13:27):
So the intent is completely the issue here, not the
fact that your action is hastening their death. Yes, passive
euthanasia that is turning off someone's ventilator life support system
does hasten their body to die. That does happen, but
it's regrettable when it happens that way. Euthanasian assisted suicide

(13:50):
is something that's intended about the death of that person.

Speaker 1 (13:55):
Yeah, a lot to unpack here. At the beginning of
the podcast, I was talking about how this is a
seminal issue. It's not one of these ten gentle issues
we're often a rabbit trail. We're talking about very substantive,
critical issues that all people need to get a handle on.

Speaker 2 (14:16):
In the past few I've been surprised too.

Speaker 3 (14:18):
And when I've talked to people sometimes who aren't really
aware of the issue very much. I've actually been surprised
that people here in California who didn't know that assistant
suicide was even legal in California, which it has been
since twenty sixteen. And I'll talk to people around here
and sometimes I'll say, oh, is that really legal here?
They didn't even know that it was. And there are

(14:38):
ten states in the US where it is legal now.

Speaker 1 (14:41):
Yeah, to that point, in the past few decades, assisted
suicide and euthanasia were illegal almost everywhere in the world.
So the operative question would be what Richard Witkhardt has changed.

Speaker 3 (14:57):
Well, there's a number of things that had changed, but
that the biggest issue I think in my analysis is
the secularization of our culture, where we have cast off
ideas about there being any God or any supreme being
above us, or anything that gives significance or meaning to life.

(15:20):
My analysis has been primarily in Europe and the United States.
I haven't done a lot of intensive analysis of Asia
or other parts of the world and stuff to see,
but you're right, in other parts of the world too.
Assistant suicide and euthanasia have not been allowed, and I
think part of the reason for that is because we
do have this within ourselves. We have this understanding that

(15:41):
human life has value. Even if you're not a Christian,
even if you're not a Jew, you know, there still
is this notion within us that human life has value.
And interestingly, even secularists a lot of times, despite their
own philosophies, will sometimes embrace that kind of view. And
in my book Death of Humanity of bringing some examples
of this. So, for example, Bertrand Russell, who was an

(16:03):
atheist philosopher, wrote a book called Why I Am Not
a Christian for example, you know very anti Christian is philosophy,
and his philosophy taught that human life is meaningless, purposeless,
but he didn't live that way. And there's a lot
of I bring in a lot of things in my
book to show that he understood really deep down, he
did understand that human life had value. That's why he

(16:24):
was supposed to nuclear weapons. For example, he was out
protesting against nuclear weapons and said why need care because
he knew that human life had value. And so a
lot of people, whether they're Christians or non Christians, whatever,
understand that human life has value. But unfortunately, as the
secular mindset when I say secondary here, I'm talking about
atheists and agnostics primarily have gained greater and greater ascendency

(16:48):
in the academic world and in caping our intellectual life
and culture. There's become this notion that, such as Bertrand
Russell's position that human life doesn't have any meaning, purpose, value, significance.
And so this then means why not you know who cares,
why not allow them to do that. Let me give
you an example of that that I bring in in

(17:10):
my book A Natural Death. There's a Jewish secular thinkers,
not Jewish religiously, but Jewish by his descent, by his ancestry,
secular thinker.

Speaker 2 (17:21):
Named Yuval Noah Harari.

Speaker 3 (17:22):
He wrote a best selling book called Sapiens, A Brief
History of Humankind. And in that book he rejects the
Declaration of Independence's claim that we hold these truths to
be self evident, that all men are created equal, they
are endowed by their creator with certain inhalienable rights. Among
these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And

(17:44):
he says, no, no, no, no, it's not true. And
based on his own secular philosophy, which he claims is science.
He claims this is scientific, his worldview scientific. He says,
this is what he says. I hear quote for you.
He says, according to the science of biology, people were
not created. They have evolved, and they certainly did not

(18:04):
evolve to be equal. Evolution is based on difference, not equality,
So he totally gets rid of equality. And then he
says created equals should therefore be translated into evolved differently,
and then he goes on to say, just as people
were never created, neither according to the science of biology,
is there a creator who endows them with anything. There's

(18:26):
only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading
to the birth of individuals. Equally, there are no such
thing as rights in biology. So he totally sweeps away
this notion of a right to life, right to anything
for matter, any kind of human rights there and human

(18:46):
equality and the sanctity of life ethic that Christianity has
taught and that has been embraced by many people worldwide,
even aside from Christianity teaches that humans are equal, that
there's something about us that makes us valuable and equal
and that gives us rights but a lot of the
secular mindset is trying to push that aside and saying, no,

(19:09):
there's there's nothing that makes human life particularly valuable. We're
just the product of accidental processes that have happened through
millions and billions of years, and so we don't have
any purpose or meeting or significance beyond what we give
ourselves to it. And so why not just end your life?
It doesn't really matter.

Speaker 1 (19:25):
Yeah, if you buy into the cult of progress, then
I think what becomes pre eminent in your mind is
survival of the fittest and the struggle for existence.

Speaker 3 (19:35):
Sure, and that's based on the Darwinnian mindset that I
just talked about here with Harari too. Do everything's just
evolved and just a matter of chance and so, and
of course they're dismissing any idea of any kind of
after life, and so you know, so you know, you're
not going to have to worry about any god or
creator or you know, any responsibility to anything beyond yourself.

(19:56):
And so you know, if you're going into nothingness essentially
according to this kind of secular mindset.

Speaker 1 (20:04):
Wonder if you can come in briefly on the significance
in this whole conversation of the hippocratic oath.

Speaker 3 (20:12):
Yeah, the hippocratic oath, interestingly under the Greeks, it was
formulated in the several centuries BC by Greek Hippocrates, but
it wasn't a majority position among Greek physicians at the time. Greeks,
many of them did practice physician assistant suicide. Not all
physicians embraced the hipocratical fact, most didn't. It was a

(20:33):
minority position among the Greeks. It only became a majority
position because of the influence of Christian Christianity, and really
in the early modern times is when it came to
be used widely by physician, and then by the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries then it was pretty widespread. Of course,
now it's on the decline because it not only forbade

(20:58):
assistant suicide, which were talking about today, but it also
forbade abortion as well, and so the hippocratic oath was
opposed to both of those and was really considered the
norm among physicians in the certainly in the eighteenth, nineteenth
and on into the early twentieth century. And physicians, to
be sure, have been fairly resistant to assisted suicide. They're

(21:22):
the minority who have become come on board with it,
and in the countries where it's sort of most advanced,
the Netherlands and Belgium, it does seem that a majority
of physicians are on board. But on the whole, in
Britain and in the United States, the medical associations have
been negative toward euthanasian assisted suicide for the most part.

(21:47):
I mean, the American Medical Association, for example, is still
opposed to euthanasian assisted suicide. Now a California Medical association
they went neutral on it before twenty sixteen. It was
voted on in California, so that's changing thumb. But the
medical profession has actually been a little more resistant than
certainly than a lot of other sort of secular thinkers

(22:07):
in other fields.

Speaker 1 (22:09):
You mentioned the ancient Greeks when you were talking about
the hippocratical o talk about the ancient Hebrews. What was
their perspective on euthanasian Yeah.

Speaker 3 (22:17):
Of course they didn't have euthanasia as we're thinking of
it today. But when we think about the issue of suicide,
which relates to this, if you look at the Old
Testament of the Christian Bible, which is of course the
Hebrew Bible, suicide is almost always presented in a negative light.
There's no out and out prescription of it that you know.

(22:37):
They're not forbidding it anywhere in scripture except for and
thou shalt not kill, which many people would argue, and
I agree with this as well, would apply to killing yourself.
So I think there is I think the Ten Commandments
you shall not murder does forbid killing your.

Speaker 2 (22:56):
Yeah, but it.

Speaker 3 (22:56):
Doesn't explicitly say that. So some people will say, you know,
think they wiggle room there and everything. But if you
look at the suicides that actually happened in the Old Testament,
almost all of them were people who were morally evil.
They're not good characters, they're not godly characters that are
killing themselves.

Speaker 2 (23:15):
Typically.

Speaker 3 (23:15):
One of the closest ones to maybe godliness view, I
think was Samson. But Samson of course was there because
of his moral failures. That's why he was in the
situation in the first place. And he what when he
so called committed suicide, He wasn't doing it with the purpose.

Speaker 2 (23:29):
Of trying to kill himself.

Speaker 3 (23:30):
He was trying to avenge his enemies in doing it,
So it wasn't just a matter of oh, I'm just
going to kill myself because I'm in pain here or
being you know, with my eyes plucked out or whatever.
So that's not presented in a favorable light either.

Speaker 1 (23:45):
You know.

Speaker 3 (23:45):
Again, Samson was there because of his moral failures. If
you look at situations where people were in extreme distress
like Job. You know, Job rebukes his wife when she
suggests that he take the out of suicide. You know,
she says, curse God and die, and Job says, no, no,

(24:07):
we receive If we receive good things from God, can't
we also receive evil, you know, at the same time.
And so Job was and Job of course is commended
in the New Testament also as a man of patience
and endurance, and that is the model that's given to
the Jews in the Old Testament and also in the
New Testament for Christians as well. The model for Christians
is to endurance in the face of suffering and trying

(24:30):
to find God's way in that path of suffering. If
it's chastisement, then to endure the chastisement. If it's for
some other cause like Job's cause, that you'd still you
endure it. And God obviously in Job's case, God rewarded
him in the end for enduring the suffering that he
went through. One thing we never see in either the

(24:52):
Old or New Testament is someone committing suicide because they
were ill. That never happened. There's no case where that
ever happen. You have in the New Testament. You have
Judas committing suicide, but again that's because of moral failure
and because he betrayed Jesus, and obviously Jesus lamented that

(25:12):
it would be better for him if he'd never been
born because of his betrayal, and then.

Speaker 2 (25:17):
Also his suicide as a result of it.

Speaker 3 (25:19):
So and in the New Testament, although it doesn't out
and out state you know, don't kill yourself, it says
your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, which
is given to you by God, and says those who
destroy the temple God will judge. So that so strongly
implies you know that you're not to harm the body

(25:41):
that God has given you, and thus makes clear that
we're not to be committing suicide.

Speaker 1 (25:47):
Yeah, and something that you point out, we've talked about
the ancient Greeks and the Hebrews, but you also in
your book talk about the Renaissance sort of a rebaptism
in the baptismal font of pagan When the Renaissance takes place,
attitudes towards suicide start to evolve as well.

Speaker 3 (26:08):
Yeah, and that's again because they're going back to the
word Renaissance course means rebirth and is a rebirth of
ancient Greek and Roman attitudes and ideas. And people were
reading a lot of the writings of those times, ideas
about the Stoics. The Stoics were a philosophy of that
was very popular among the ancient Romans, and the Stoics

(26:29):
were very pro suicide. They very much thought that a person,
once they reached the point where they no longer had
any abilities to you, enjoy their life any longer, that
they thought they should commit suicide. So and so the
Renaissance was a rebirth of these Roman and Greek ideas,

(26:50):
including the Stoics and others. And so they began discussing
and writing about some of the They begin writing about
some of the suicides in fact of the ancient Roman
and really glorifying them. A lot of the people in
the Renaissance were not yet willing because of the influence
of Christianity. They were not yet willing to come out
and overtly say, you know, we're promoting just a you know,

(27:14):
we're promoting suicide. But they did begin glorifying some of
the ancient Romans who did commit suicide, and so in
this way, you're right, the attitudes did begin to creep
in at that time, during the Renaissance period in the
fifteen sixteenth centuries.

Speaker 1 (27:30):
So someone might ask, what's the relevance of writing in
your book about history? Could it be that if we
don't know history, we're resigned to repeating history. So it's
very important to understand what happened in the past so
we can see exactly what's maybe taking place in our

(27:51):
own context.

Speaker 3 (27:52):
Sure, you know, I think, and it's good I think
to be able to compare the ideas and see how
they've changed over time as we're going through And I
think in looking at the and as I look at
the Greco Roman context and how they dealt with issues
like systed suicide and also infanticide, which I discussed some

(28:13):
there too, because they were very much supportive of killing infants,
especially with disabilities. But basically the parents had the option
to kill their infant, you know, under any kind of circumstances.
There was no penalties for that. They called it exposing
them because they usually would just leave them out in
the fields to either be devoured by a wild animal
or to die of dehydration. But I think it's useful

(28:36):
to compare the attitudes of the people in the ancient world,
say there, with the Jewish and Christian attitudes of the time,
to see what the difference is and how the worldviews
differed on the whole. And once again, being a Christian myself,
you know, it strikes me that, you know, the Greeks
and the Romans, even though they believe in gods, they

(28:58):
believe in a lot of different things. They didn't not
have the idea of the humans being created in the
image of God, which the Christians had. And again, I
do think that there are a lot of people in
other cultures, and again I haven't done extensive research in
a lot of these other cultures, but ETHER think there's
a lot of people in other cultures who do have
that sense inside themselves because God's given us a conscience.

(29:18):
God's given every one of us a conscience, whether we're
a Christian or not. Sometimes that conscience is misguided and dead,
and you know, other kinds of things, but He's given
us a conscience, and so I think a lot of
people understand the value in life. But Christianity has a
reason to support the notion that human life has value.
And that's why when I move into the nineteenth century

(29:40):
and twentieth and start showing the impact of secular thought
and the way that they undermine the notion that human
life has any value, this is then what leads us
into this that Euthanasian assistant suicide is permissible. Now, it's
interesting that there are some people of liberal mindset who
do reject Euthanasian assistant suicide, and sometimes they even try

(30:07):
to back away from the religious dimension to it. But
I think that's maybe misguided in some ways, because again,
without the religious underpinnings, you know, if there is no God,
if there is no morality. Essentially, if there is no
God and then morality is just evolved, which is what
a lot of Darwinists believe in such too, then why not,

(30:30):
you know, just end your life. You know, what's the
big deal about it. It's just it's another event in
the universe, just another chance event that took place, you know,
with all the other chance events that are taking place
in the universe. But Christianity shows us that there is
something distinctive about humans that give this value that gives
meaning and purpose to our lives, and that even gives

(30:52):
meaning and purpose to suffering, which is one of the
issues here too, because again most people think that I'm
going through the suffering. Oh it's horrible. Well, you know,
I can't go through the suffering. It's awful, and I
just can't take it, and so I got to just
end my life to get rid of the suffering. Which,
by the way, if there is an afterlife, they may
have more problems in front of them, they may have

(31:12):
more suffering ahead of them anyway, but they don't believe that,
of course. But Christianity gives a reason to endoored suffering
as well, and goes a meaning even in suffering. Not
that suffering is a good thing for christian You know,
death and suffering are the result of the fall. There
is a result of evil. But God can use them

(31:34):
for good purposes. And we see that again in the
Book of Job. We see that in a lot of
other episodes. Well, Jesus life himself the most obvious one,
you know, Jesus himself goes through suffering and death for
our sakes.

Speaker 1 (31:47):
Yes, he does. And you know, as you're speaking, I
can't help but think back to my own experience. I
was born in the Netherlands in nineteen fifty. We immigrated
nineteen fifty three. My father, very committed Christian towards the
end of his life, had a fibrosing of the lungs
and it encroaches upon your ability to assimilate oxygen. And

(32:09):
I still remember vividly. He was seventy four years old,
same age as I am right this minute. I was
having this conversation when he was exactly the same age
I was. He was seventy four. I'm seventy four now,
but anyway, back then, there was nineteen ninety seven. I
watched him suffer, Richard. I watched the agony that he

(32:29):
was going through just to get a gulp of air,
and I remember asking him, Dad, wouldn't you just like
to go home and be with the Lord? And I'll
never forget what he told me. He said, no, every
moment is precious, and so the very value that you
talk about the value in suffering he was expressing to

(32:53):
me with those words.

Speaker 3 (32:54):
Yeah, And that's very interesting because a lot of people
when they get in those situations again, it is I
want to be with the Lord. I want to and
there's nothing wrong with that. By the way, there is
nothing wrong with wanting to be released from suffering. Of course,
we want to be released from suffering. No one likes
to suffer. But you're right, it's amazing how the attitudes
have changed in our culture to where you know, suffering

(33:18):
is the absolute worst thing that can happen. Whereas we
don't think about eternity, we don't think in the in
reference to eternity these days. You know, I actually, you
know you're talking about your dad. My mother in law
is living with us right now. She's ninety one years old.
She's got dementia, and I'm sort of a primary caretaker

(33:38):
in a lot of ways. I get up at night
with her and do different things with her and everything.
And you think, well, what's the purpose, what's the meaning
of her life, you know, in this time? And yet
you know that's not our call, you know, that's not
my decision to make, you know, when her life is
going to end. I am called to be a servant.
I'm called to, you know, be a blessing to those

(33:59):
and you know, those people with disabilities. And what strikes
me too, and you know in this whole conversation too,
is that, you know, there's a lot of people who
seek after resisted suicide and euthanasia, not just because of
the suffering and pain. Sometimes, you know, that is an
issue there, but a lot of times it's because of
the loneliness. It's because of lack of relationship with other people.

(34:23):
And some people who do this will actually say this forthrightly.
Other times they don't necessarily say that, but it's become
clear from the data. I mean, Oregon keeps data on
they pull people who request assisted suicide, and they keep
data on why they request assistant suicide. And a lot
of times it doesn't have to do with pain. Less
than fifty percent of the time does it have to

(34:44):
do with pain. So this is not just an issue
of pain. It's an issue that has to do with
human relationships. It has an issue to do with well,
really with love. You know, the people are lacking the
love in their life that they need, and a lot
of times if they had that love, you know, they
would be willing to go through that suffering. But without
love and without connections and things that it just torments

(35:09):
them even more and it just drives them in ways
that are unfortunate.

Speaker 1 (35:13):
Yeah, when you talk about your mother in law, I
can't help but think that you can't see necessarily the
purpose of that suffering she's going through with dementia. My
mother was also afflicted with dementia towards the end of
her life. She died at ninety three. But in taking
care of someone in that circumstance, you are changed the caretaker,

(35:33):
the caregiver is changed. My brother was the primary caregiver
because he lived in the same locale, same state with
my mother, and I can tell you he was irrevocably
changed for the better. He was a great person at
any rate, but he was irrevocably changed for the better
through that experience. It is life altering, and in a

(35:56):
very positive sense in the context of the discussion, at
least somewhat in the context of the discussion talking about utilitarianism.

Speaker 3 (36:04):
Kay Utilitarianism was a philosophy that came about in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is still pretty prominent today.
Peter Singer, whom I mentioned a little bit earlier, who
has an endowed chair at Princeton University, it considers himself
a utilitarian. The utilitarian philosophy was a philosophy that pleasure
is the highest good. Essentially was going back. It was

(36:24):
sort of recycling in some ways the Epicurean philosophy from
the Greeks, which saw happiness, happiness or pleasure as being
the highest good. And so usually they will justify morally
whatever they think promotes what they call the greatest happiness
for the greatest number. That was a term that Jeremy Bentham,
who's considered the founder of utilitarian philosophy, but again it

(36:46):
goes back to the really he was influenced by Epicurean
philosophy from the Greeks as well. Bentham said that what
is morally permissible was morally good. Well, morally good is
what promotes the greatest happiness for the greatest number. And
by happiness he meant pleasure, physical pleasure.

Speaker 2 (37:06):
So and this is.

Speaker 3 (37:08):
Again even among people who don't know the term utilitarianism,
that have never heard of utilitarian philosophy, this does it
becoming more and more widespread that just whatever causes pleasure
is the good thing in life, and that's what we
should be striving after, you know, just going after our
own pleasures and such, and you can see why that
would be appealing to people. Of course, it is appealing

(37:29):
because it caters to our fleshly natures, not because it
really satisfying to our spiritual hunger that we have in life.
And so, unfortunately, the idea is that whatever causes pleasure
is good, whatever causes pain is bad. And so when
people have more pain than pleasure than the utilitarian philosophy

(37:52):
seems to suggest that it's probably better for them to
kill themselves or to be gotten rid of in one
way or another. In fact, just to give you one
sense of how this got applied in terms of killing people,
Jeremy Bentham argued. Although he didn't argue this by the
way publicly, this was in private manuscripts that Jeremy Bentham

(38:12):
wrote back in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Jeremy
Bentham claimed that committing infanticide was morally permissible, and the
reason that he thought it was morally permissible was because
he didn't believe there was any such thing as an
inherent right to life or anything like that, because again
he thought that leasure the only thing that counts as

(38:32):
being good, and so there's no right life earning to
any human being. There's no nothing beyond us. But what
he said was that the reason that Peter get infanticide
is not is morally permissible is because the infant doesn't
know it's going to get killed, so it doesn't suffer
any pain or fear of pain. You know, you just
kill it instantly, you know, as long as you're not

(38:54):
causing it pain, he said, you know, you don't torture
it or whatever. But as long as you just kill
it instantly, he thought that was permit and so he
said the infant wouldn't feel any pain. The reason that
Jeremy Bentham said that killing an adult not morally permissible
is because that would cause fear among people that they
might be a victim of that. But the baby doesn't

(39:16):
know it, so you know, it's okay to kill a baby.
It's not okay to kill humans, not because there's any
right to life, according to Bentham and the utilitarian idea,
because that would cause fear among people, and that fear
would cause pain.

Speaker 1 (39:31):
Interesting. You know, we just went through an election cycle,
and I've often said that the ballot box is necessary,
but it's not sufficient because our culture is changed by
so many other dynamics, including the entertainment industry. And I
note in your book you talk about a movie called
The Black Stork. And in this movie there's a theme

(39:53):
that there are times when saving a life is a
greater crime than taking a life. I mean, that's an
incredible presupposition.

Speaker 3 (40:05):
Yeah, And the movie was put out by a physician
named Harry Heizelden who had created a controversy by refusing
treatment for an infant that was born that could have
been saved, that the life of that infinite it seems
pretty clear, could have been saved, but the infant would
have been disabled, and so he decided not to intervene medically.

(40:29):
He convinced the parents, you know, not to do anything,
and so the infant died. It was called the Bolinger
baby case. And so this movie was sort of a
takeoff on that, sort of showing his justification for it
and sort of putting forth his philosophy out to the world.
Came out the nineteen teens, if I recall correctly, The

(40:51):
Black Stork did, and it was to try to promote
his ideas about how it's better sometimes not to intervene,
rather to allow people who are sort of considered negative
or you know. And by the way, this is a
time Harry Heizelden as a physician, and this is a
time in the late eighteen nineties and early nineteen hundreds
when there were a lot of physicians and people who

(41:14):
are putting what was known as eugenics, which was a
way to try to engineer humanity, create a higher humanity
by getting rid of people with disabilities, trying to control
reproduction in various ways. They tried to introduce compulsory sterilismy
not tried to.

Speaker 2 (41:30):
They did.

Speaker 3 (41:30):
They introduced compulsory sterilization in a lot of states in
the United States as well as Denmark and other countries.
And the Nazis of course introduced that as well. And
so Harry high Seldon as well as a lot of
others viewed people with disabilities as being They use to
sometimes the word unfit, the evolutionary word unfit. They also
use some really derogatory terms though, referring to them as

(41:54):
being burdened and useless. And of course the Nazis took
the term over from other German thinkers useless eaters. That
was a term used by the Germans relating to them,
but consider them burdens, and they had very negative views
of people with disabilities, and so the idea was, let's
try to get rid of them one way or another. Now,
some people in the eugenics movement, to be sure, tried

(42:16):
to just use controlling reproduction, like sterilization of the kinds
of things, but other ones thought they should go ahead
and just kill the people outright killed people with disabilities,
and that that was morally permissible. The Nazis, of course,
we're going to take that very in a more fanatical
way than most people did. But in the United States
there were people. In Britain, there were people promoting the

(42:38):
same kind of idea too, that, you know, we should
just kill people with disabilities to try to improve the
human race.

Speaker 1 (42:44):
Something else I noted in your book which absolutely shocked me.
I didn't know about this, so I was very surprised
to read about Helen Keller's support of eugenics and euthanasia.

Speaker 3 (42:55):
Yeah, I was very surprised to read that too, because
of course she would have been a candidate for some
stages of her life according to the norms of some
people at the time. But yeah, I was kind of
shocked by that as well, that she thought that some
people were less valuable than others, and even though she
herself was a disability rights advocate, in some ways there

(43:18):
were some people that she thought were better off dead.

Speaker 1 (43:21):
You talk a lot about Darwinism in the book, and
appropriately so, and you mentioned someone earlier, Ernest Takel. He
of course is famous for the evolutionary cliche ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,
that the emerging embryo goes through all of the evolutionary stages.
So if you abort early on in the process, you're
not aborting an infant, you're aborting a creature. So Darwinism

(43:47):
had such an incredible impact not only in the nineteenth
and twentieth century, but hasn't continues to have an incredible
impact on this whole subjet in the present.

Speaker 3 (44:01):
Oh yeah, it certainly does. And of course I read
earlier that quotation from Noah You Will Noah Harari's book
where he used this potentially evolutionary thinking. Peter Singer uses
the same kind of thinking as well. Singer hasn't written
an entire book on it like James Rachel's. Has I
mentioned Rachel's book earlier, Created from Animals, The moral implications
of Darwinism where he uses Darwinism very forthrightly to justify

(44:24):
these things. But Singer has indicated at quite a number
of different places that Darwinism does underpin his view that
humans do not have any overarching purpose in life or
anything beyond ourselves, nothing transcendent, there's no value to human life.
In fact, I actually had an opportunity to debate Peter

(44:48):
Singer on a radio show Unbelievable, where the debate was
over is human life intrinsically valuable? Of course he took
the negative view that human life is not intrinsically valuable,
and part of that's based on his Darwinian worldview, and
by the way, hitting on that theme too. There actually
are three scholars who have written sort of the best

(45:12):
books about the Euthanasian movement, the Euthanasian and Assistant Suicide movement.
In the United States, that's Ian Daubigen. In Britain that's
Nick Kemp, and in Germany that's Hans Walter Schmuhl, and
all three of those make very clear that Darwinism was
one of the very important underpinnings ideological underpinnings of the

(45:32):
Euthanasian movement in the nineteenth and on in the twentieth century.

Speaker 1 (45:36):
It's so interesting when you maybe macabre, when you think
about the idea that we see an animal that's struggling,
horse breaks a leg or whatever, and we put the
horse down, we put the dog down, whatever. We don't
think twice about that. But if you have a materialist worldview,
perhaps you don't have to think twice about putting a

(45:56):
human being out of its suffering, out of his or
her suffering.

Speaker 3 (46:00):
Yeah, certainly. And Jerry Coin in his book, I think
it's called fact versus faith. If I recall correctly, it
might be a faith versus fact, but I think it's
fact versus faith. Jerry Coyn, who's a prominent atheist. He
was evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. He's now emeritus,
but he in his book Factors as Faith, makes that
very argument. He says, look, we put animals down, that's

(46:20):
the compassionate thing to do, so why won't we do
that for humans? And so my response to that is, well, Jerry,
why don't we, you know, round up all the homeless
people in Chicago.

Speaker 2 (46:33):
He's from Chicago.

Speaker 3 (46:34):
Why don't you just round up all the homeless people there,
and why don't we incarcerate them and sterilize them, and
then if we can't find a home for them, we
can't find anyone to take them into their home, then
we will euthanize them. And Jerry Coin, of course, progressive
that he is, would be horrified by suggestion like that.
He was in, of course, we're not going to do

(46:55):
something thing like that. But what I just described you
is exactly.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
What we do to dog.

Speaker 3 (47:00):
And so the point is we don't treat dogs the
way we treat humans. We don't treat humans the way
we treat dogs, and we shouldn't and he knows that,
but they will still use that argument, and he does
use that argument in his book that say, well, we
put down dogs, that's the compassionate thing to do, so
we should do it to humans too. Well, my argument is, well,
humans aren't dogs.

Speaker 1 (47:18):
I was going to get into this a little later
on in the podcast, but maybe I'll approach this subject
right now, and this is asking for your opinion. Look,
right now, we have a huge debt, a debt that
could cripple a country, destroy a country. We're talking about
thirty five trillion dollars somewhere in that vicinity. Where do

(47:40):
we get to in America where we say, you know what,
the homeless people you're just talking about, they're a burden
to society, or elderly people that have diseases that are
going to lead to death anyway, they're a burden to society.
Where do we get to point where we say, look,

(48:02):
we need to look at our debt. We need to
look at the whole the good of the people that
are healthy and wealthy and wise, and get rid of
these people. Round up these people that you mentioned in
your analogy and get rid of them because they are
costing us a lot of money. I mean, there's a

(48:23):
societal factor here. But you can also look at families.
As I mentioned, I grew up in the Netherlands, where
you start to think, you know what if my uncle
Pete or my aunt Gertrude, if she keeps living, whatever
inheritance I would get will be gone. Maybe it's better
for her to die. I think about this very thing.

(48:46):
I mean, all of my siblings are Christian. The very
thought of allowing my mother to die early because she
had dimension would be anathema to us. But you know,
we looked at the reality that the longer she lived,
the more we would have to chip in to take
care of her financially. Now, we had no problem doing

(49:06):
that whatsoever, because we saw the value of her life.
But if you're a secular society, I can what's that
agency we have now? Doze say, you know, look, this
is a way that we can cut a lot of
money out of our budget.

Speaker 3 (49:23):
Oh yeah, And that works itself out in several different ways.
One way is that when Oregon. I mentioned earlier that Oregon,
when they allow assistant suicide, they actually do take surveys
of why the people have wanted the assistant suicide, and
one of the responses that is used. I think it's
over ninety percent if I recall correctly of responses. And

(49:45):
by the way, they can have multiple causes, so it's
not like they can choose. They can have three or
four or five different causes, not like they're choosing one.
Over ninety percent of respondence if I recall correctly said
that they do not want to be a burden on
their relatives. That's one of the reasons why they're requesting

(50:06):
assistant suicide. So sometimes this issue of being a burden
on others the person themselves has internalized that and they
don't want to be a burden on other people, and
so they think it's better if I just go ahead
and die now rather than burden my relatives either financially
or with time and the kinds of things like that.
So that's one way that issue can work itself out.

(50:27):
There's another way, interestingly, that can work out though, too,
and that is by other people suggesting that you should
go ahead and kill yourself in with assistant suicide or euthanasian.
This has happened. This is not just speculation. This is
something that's actually happened on a number of occaions. Let
me give you one example that I bring out in
my book a retired corporal in Canada. Canada has had

(50:51):
euthanasia for the since the twenty teens and has really
one of the most advanced euthanasia stems out there in
terms of the numbers of people being killed. But in
twenty twenty two, so just a couple of years ago,
a lady named Christine Gautier who was a corporal in
the Canadian military, but she became paraplegic. She actually competed

(51:14):
in the Para Olympics at one point, but she gave
testimony to an arliamentary committee in Canada that she was
having problems with the Veterans Affair Canada because she was
trying to get them to install a wheelchair ramp on
her home and they didn't want to do it because
it was too too much expense. Right, So what you're
talking about, you know, this issue of money. You know,

(51:35):
they didn't want to fork out the finances to give
her a wheelchair ramp at her home, and so she
has to crawl out of her house, you know, to
get into a wheelchair and such and to get anywhere. Well,
in twenty nineteen, when she was asking for this wheelchair ramp,
a Veterans Affair case manager said this to her, Madam,

(51:57):
if you are really so desperate, we can give you
medical assistance in dying now, you know. So here she's
being told, you know, oh, we can't afford to give
you this wheelchair ramp, but if you want medical assistants dying,
we can get that for you, you know. And so
here we have this situation where okay, you know, they're
not wanting to we're not wanting to provide for you

(52:18):
in a way that you know you can live comfortably.
But we will willing to kill you and let to
let you die, that's what you know, if you're willing
to write off on that. And that's not the only
time this has happened. There's a man in Canada also
who had like one hundred thousand dollars in hospital bills,
and the hospital personnel we're telling him, you know, you
got to take medical assistance and dying, you know, because

(52:39):
you're running up these huge bills. You're never going to
be real pay this, you know, and all this, and
so this has happened on a number occasions. The other
way it works itself out, too, is that insurance companies,
of course benefit when people take assistant suicide and so
they of course are very willing to cover the costs

(52:59):
of the prescription. They may not be willing to cover
the costs of your procedure that you need, you know,
to make your life bearable, but they will be willing
to cover your assistant suicide dose that you could get.
So there's a number of different ways that this works
itself out in terms of sometimes pressuring people, you know,
usually people aren't going to out and out, you know,

(53:22):
say hey, you know you ought to kill yourself, you know,
but although a few occasions that's happened, but usually that's
not going to happen. But still there's this subtle pressure
that I think is more pervasive, that people feel like, well,
I just did better if I do it so that
I'm not a burden on people in society. You know,
it's interesting with your point though that you're making. You know,
when is it going to reach the tipping point where
the society is going to be even more puching for it?

(53:45):
You know, I don't know. I hope it doesn't come
to that, but you know it could.

Speaker 1 (53:49):
You never know, speak to the issue of cognitive dissonance,
because on the one hand, there's a very strong sentiment
towards equity or equality, not that the or. On the
other hand, a lot of people have imbibed Fredrich Nietzsche's
idea that we're not created equal. We're not created in

(54:10):
the first place, but we're not equal, and have really
underscored a radical opposition to equality. I mean, we saw
this in Nazi Germany, where you have, on the one
hand a predilection towards the ubermensch, the superman, and the
other the disabled or the person that is not of

(54:32):
the right ethnic origin or whatever, and you can get
rid of those and that's all permissible in the struggle
for survival, the struggle the fittest.

Speaker 3 (54:43):
Yeah, yeah, you're right. It is cognitive dissonance. And there's
this interesting interplay going on where people are, you know,
if you look at the higher echelons of intellectual life
and such, where Nietzsche's ideas are being lawed in and
honored and such, even though he was teaching this radical

(55:03):
inequality and such, whereas people are talking about social justice
and other kinds of things and all leads trying to
bring about equality for all sorts of ways. There is
a bitsinesce there. It comes out in a number of
different ways too, in this particular issue as well. I
mean in terms of the distance. I mean people with disabilities.
We have the Americans with Disabilities Act that was put

(55:24):
forward in the nineteen nineties, and there's a lot of
push for disability rights and such. And I should say
too that some of the people that are promoting rights
don't even believe in rights. Just like I mentioned earlier
about Rari not believing in rights. There's also people that
are embracing Nietzsche's philosophy don't believe in rights people Thupau,

(55:47):
who I don't know. I don't how familiar with Fupou,
but Fuqau is a famous French thinker in the late
twentieth century. He's considered a darling among a lot of
intellectuals today and American academ and Fucaut taught that there
was no such thing as human rights, even though he
would use the language of human rights himself. He would
use that language to try to, you know, to try
to It is basically a rhetorical move to try to

(56:10):
convince people and get people on board with his projects
that he was wanting, which by the way, he also
promoted assistant suicide and I talk about him in my
book Death of Humanity. But through those ideas which are
again very widespread, and they talk that there's no such
thing as human rights, but then they'll use the language
of human rights, you know, when it suits their purposes

(56:31):
and they think it they can puish their rhetorical moves.
So there's this cognitive distance on all sorts of levels.
And it comes out with the disability rights as well,
which I just mentioned that there's you know, the click
for disability rights. But on the other hand, there's a
lot of people in disability rights groups that are now
are pushing against assistant suicide and euthanasia.

Speaker 2 (56:48):
Because they see the way that that's.

Speaker 3 (56:49):
Going, that that's going to quick people with disabilities to
take that line of attack. We also have the cognitive
dissonance in relation to suicide. We have all these anti
suicide programs that are being very often funded by governments
and such, and you know, hotlines and everything else to
try to gersuade people from committing suicide unless you know,

(57:13):
you happen to have this particular condition and that will
help you, you know, commit suicide. And so again there's
cognitive dissonance there too. You know, what is it about that?
Why is it that we're saying that this young person,
you know, who is teenager, you know, or twenty something
person who wants to commit suicide because they've been jolted
by their lover or something like that, you know, or whatever,

(57:34):
that they've been bullied by their peers. Why are we
trying to offer suicide prevention programs for them? But then
these other people, you know, will help them commit suicide,
you know, if that's really what they want. So there's
there's dissonance there as well. That I think we need
to reckon with.

Speaker 1 (57:52):
As long as we're naming names, talk about the organizers
or the members of the growing euthanasian movement, and in
both the United States and places like Britain.

Speaker 3 (58:04):
Well, there's a lot of bioethicists in the United States
who are pushing it. I mentioned Peter Singer already as
one who is sort of in the higher echelons of
the bioethics movement. There's a lot of other bioethicists though,
who are promoting the ideas of euthanasia and assistant suicide.
There's also sort of the organizers though, who are more

(58:25):
sort of the grassroots, trying to push it in the
different places in Orgon in the nineteen nineties and then
in the other dates and trying to spread it to
different places. So there's organizations you to be called the
Euthanasia Society of America back in the nineteen thirties and forties.
They've since more.

Speaker 2 (58:44):
They're not.

Speaker 3 (58:44):
Compassionate Choices is one of the organizers organizing figures of them.
So they're trying to sort of organize it on a
grassroots level and push it legislation in different places. They're
not always successful and again, and we do have ten
states that have it. But interestingly, this past year, although
it was introduced to a number of legislatures, fortunately none

(59:07):
of them adopted it except for one, and in that
case the governor. This was in New Jersey. The governor
vetoed the bill. It barely passed. It passed, I think
by one vote if I recall correctly, in the legislature.
The governor, who a democratic governor, venoted it. So this
is actually a bipart is an issue. It's not just
necessarily part of an issue. It does seem that more

(59:28):
on the Republican side are opposed to it and more
on the democratic side or supportive of it. But it's
not just a democratic Republican thing. There's a lot of
Democrats who oppose it as well, and not sometimes for
ideological reasons, but sometimes also just for practical reasons that
they recognize that you know, once you get rid of

(59:49):
human equality, you know, where do you draw the line.
That's the big issue. That's one issue that I raised
in one of the last chapters of my book. I
have a chapter on aton on the slippery Slope and
a chapter on autom autonomy. Those two arguments the slippery
slope arguments usually considered the best argument against assisted suicide
and euthanasia. The autonomy arguments usually considered the best argument

(01:00:10):
for euthanasian assisted suicide. So I try to dismantle that
and the slippery slope argument. I talk about the way
that once you decide that there is no that human life,
that some human lives don't have any value, where do
you decide which ones those are? You know who decides
what human lives have value and which ones don't. And interestingly,

(01:00:34):
Peter Singer, who has wrestled with that question, has said
that they have that human beings in order to have value.
And by the way, he, along with others other bioethicists,
use the term personhood theory, or calling someone a person.
They distinguish between a human being a person, and they
say a person has value, but a human being doesn't

(01:00:56):
necessarily have value. They may or may not depending on
whether they are a person. But what defines a person?
They say a person is defined by having a certain
kind of rational capability ability to and Singer talks about
them being able to plan the future, for example, But
how much of that do you need?

Speaker 2 (01:01:14):
You know?

Speaker 3 (01:01:14):
That is really you know, they don't really provide any
clear idea as to how much rationality, how much ability
to plan the future does it have to be there
in order for a human being to be a person.
And so there's no real clear dividing line even among them.
And I actually pressed Peter Singer on that in the
radio debate that I did with him by saying, well,

(01:01:36):
I said, hey, you know Joseph Fletcher who was a
famous bioethicist back in the nineteen fifties and sixties, well
famous among bioethicists, not among the general populace, but Joseph
Fletcher who helped formulate this personhood theory back in the
fifties and sixties. He claimed that there were fifteen different
characteristics you know, that helped define a person, and it

(01:01:58):
had to do things with like a p have esthetic
values and morality and other kinds of having moral values
and other and as well as rationality and things like that.
So there's a number of doing fifteen different things that
he says, So I told, I asked Peter Singer, now
you know you're telling his rationality and the ability to
plan the future is what gives a human be value.
Fletcher gave these other characteristics and everything too, So you know,

(01:02:20):
how do we decide which one which which actually defines
him being? And Singer really couldn't answer that. He basically said,
that's a discussion we need to be having. That's what
he said. Well, he didn't really have an answer for that.

Speaker 1 (01:02:32):
But it's a discussion he's already had with himself. Because,
as I remember, if I remember correctly, you make this
distinction between a human being and personhood. Singer doesn't want
to say that when someone is birth that you immediately
can say now we have personhood, but it may take

(01:02:54):
a period of time before we can make that decision.
I remember the number three days. It seems arbitrary, but
that's what I remember him saying. Is that correct?

Speaker 3 (01:03:03):
One time he actually said one month, and other times
he's actually given do right now. And when we talked
about it on the radio interview that I did with
him just a few years ago. Now he's unwilling to
take a stance as to when the baby becomes a person.
He clearly does not think that a baby is a person.
That a newborn baby he does not think is a person.

(01:03:26):
That is clear, But again he's unwilling to say when,
And interestingly, in my opinion, based on his own philosophy,
there really isn't a dividing line based on time, because
different babies might have different rational ability, different babies might
have different abilities in terms of landing the future, which

(01:03:48):
is the two of the big things that he relies
on there. So in reality, I think, based on his
own philosophy, different human beings would become persons at different times.
There isn't no one time when they would become a person.

Speaker 2 (01:04:03):
There.

Speaker 3 (01:04:03):
And also the end of a life thing. Er believes
that if a person loses their cognitive capacities, so if
a person has dementia, for example, Singer also argues that
they no longer have a value in their life and
thus their life can be terminated as well. So, but
there's no real clear dividing line, and Singer is pretty

(01:04:24):
cagy about trying to put a dividing line on it,
and he really doesn't have a way to do it.
And that's the problem, in fact, not just with Singer's philosophy,
with the philosophy of anyone that wants to try to say, well,
let me give an example here in California, Okay, in California,
which our law is actually based upon the Oregon law,
so it's pretty similar to the organ assistant suicide law,

(01:04:45):
and they're the California assistant suicide law. You have to
have a position diagnose you. In fact, you have to
have two physician that diagnose you with a criminal illness
and with which you have less than six months to live, Okay.
So that's the dividing line that the California legislature has

(01:05:07):
made and determined to allow assisted suicide or not allow
assistant suicide. So but why six months, you know, why
not a year? And even by the way, even with
six months, it's very subjective because physicians don't know exactly
how long a person can live. And so some people

(01:05:28):
in Oregon who have the same laws six months, some
people have lived longer than six months, have live lived
longer than a year with their medications that they've been
given for assistant suicide because you're not required to take them.
Of course, you're allowed to take them whenever you want to.
Some people in organ never take their assisted suicide medications
that are prescribed to them, and sometimes they live more
than a year long or something, who knows how long

(01:05:51):
in some cases, so the ideas very and why a
terminal illness. And in fact, if you look at other
countries like Canada and Belgium and Netherlands, they don't require
a terminal illness. They only require that a person being
irremediable suffering for example, or something like that. So, once
you get rid of the idea that every human being's

(01:06:15):
life has value, there's no real clear dividing line of
where to decide to draw that line. Who's going to
have value and who's not going to have value. That's
just a shift is going to be a shifting thing
based on whatever value. So usually what happens in the
United States when people are pushing for legalization of assisted
suicide is they try to claim that, oh, we're just

(01:06:36):
doing this for a very small number of people. It's
just a very you know, tiny minority the population who's
in this intense suffering, you know, right at the end
of their lives and such. If we look at other kindries.
But then what happens is once they get that law
on the book, we tend to try to push for
expanding it and broadening it. Now in the United States,
they haven't been particularly successful in broadening it a lot,

(01:06:58):
although they have a little bit in organ For example,
you used to have to be a citizen of Oregon.
Now you don't have to be a citizen of Oregon.
You can come from any state in the United States
to Oregon to get assisted suicide. So they do I
have been broadening out in certain ways, although they still
have the six month law. But if you look at
other countries like the Netherlands and Belgium, which have had
assistant suicide and even euthanasia much longer than the United

(01:07:20):
States has, and where the culture has adopted that to
much greater extent, Now we have situations where four five
percent and even more of the deaths in those countries
are being done through euthanasia. Canada, I think is all
Firepalkult These also were five percent. Now the deaths in
Canada are being caused by what they call medical assistance

(01:07:42):
and dying, that is euthanasia. So it starts expanding more
and more. Yeah, so one at every twenty deaths.

Speaker 1 (01:07:48):
You know, you write about Holland, and justifiably so or
the Netherlands. I was born there, as I mentioned earlier
on the podcast, and you know I love the Netherlands.
Every time I landed the Netherlands, I feel happy because
it was the place I was born, and euphoria overtakes me.
But if you look at Netherlands, you have a microcross
maybe even an idea of what's going to happen in

(01:08:10):
other countries as they progress in their thinking, as they
become more and more secularized. But here you have the
land of the Reformation that is now secularized to the
point that they are giving us a roadmap to what
is happening or what can take place all around the world.

Speaker 3 (01:08:28):
Yeah, and other countries our following suit. It's happening not rapidly,
I would say, but Germany, Spain and Austria in the
past few years have allowed for assistant suicide. Belgia well,
and Belgian BILLI yeah, Belgium went right along with Netherlands.
They were pretty right behind. So I spend a good
bit of time in my book talking about Belgium. Luxembourg

(01:08:49):
also a much smaller country, but they also sort of
went the same way that Netherlands and Belgium went. Luxembourg
also and Switzerland of course, has gone a little slightly
different route in the way they did it, but they
are allowing it in a big way as well there.
But Spain, Germany and Austria is more recently have passed
laws or had judicial decisions. In Germany it was a

(01:09:10):
judicial decision allowing for assisted suicide, and so yeah, it's
being followed by other countries as well. In Britain, the
Labor government just took over and they just recently passed
a bill. Now it still has to be passed again,
if I understand correctly, it's not a done deal yet,
but it did pass the House of Commons to allow

(01:09:32):
for assisted suicide in Britain as well. There, so it
remains to be seen if it's going to pass again
and become law. It's not law yet in Britain, but
it looked like it may be on the way. We're
not sure yet.

Speaker 1 (01:09:45):
Yeah, So the secularization of Dutch society, you actually, I
don't know if you use the acronym or if I
tend to make up acronyms on the fly, but the
secularization is epitomized. But the secular revolution abortion and by
drug use. So you have sad, a sad situation, the
sexual revolution, abortion and drug use. And you now see

(01:10:09):
in Holland this progression that's taken place. You know, you've
legalized drug use, you've legalized prostitution. All of this is
sort of a prototype or a pattern for what is
happening all over the world. And I need you to
expand on that somewhat so that people can see, Look,

(01:10:32):
this has happened in a civilized country, and it can
happen here. This is not mythology.

Speaker 3 (01:10:37):
Yeah, and if you look at the issues of relating
to the fate of Christianity in the Netherlands as well,
church attendance is much lower in the Netherlands than in
most of the other European countries as well. So Christianity
has really declined pretty considerably. In You're right, it was
a country of the Reformation. It was Reformed Calvinist, the

(01:11:01):
Dutch Reformed Church and everything. But yeah, it's really moved
away from those roots pretty radically. I mean, the Enlightenment
in the eighteenth century began a lot of that decline,
and so even by the end of the nineteen hundreds
early nineteen hundreds, there already was a lot of secularization.
Some of that got turned back. There were some revivals

(01:11:22):
that took place in the early nineteenth century and such
a turnback that to some degree, but still that secular
mindset was going to begin to become stronger and stronger
over time over the nineteenth century, and then by the
twentieth century time you get to the sixties, with the
sexual Revolution all that kind of stuff, it was going
to become a really a idle wave.

Speaker 1 (01:11:46):
On what basis is euthanasia determined? Who decides?

Speaker 3 (01:11:51):
Well, in all the countries right now that have legalized euthanasia,
it's supposed to be the person who is receiving it.
That they're supposed to have the choice, and that's why
philosophers argue for the autonomy argument, saying that the person
should have the choice to be able to do these things. Now,

(01:12:11):
there's a couple of interesting things about that though. For
one thing, although the person is supposed to be the
one choosing it, there's a lot of evidence that in
countries that implement euthanasia that the physicians do seem to
have a little more license to do things that they

(01:12:32):
end up getting away with in terms of killing people
who maybe not willing to do it, and willing is
kind of be a fudge term too in certain ways.
Because we had one case, and I think it was
in Belgium, it might have been Netherlands, but I think
it was in Belgium where a woman had signed an
advanced directive but if she reached a certain cognitive state

(01:12:56):
that she wanted to be euthanized, and when she reached
the state where her family and physician thought she had,
you know, reached the place where advanced directives should kick in,
they wanted to administer that to her. But interestingly, they
asked her first, you know, whether she thought the time

(01:13:16):
had come for her to be euthanized, and she said no.
She made very clear she did not want to be euthanized.
At that point, they went ahead and held her down
and did it anyway and euthanized her. And in court
they were exonerating having done that. There was a court
case over it. They were prosecuted, but they were exonerated

(01:13:39):
by the court for doing that. So this lady, you know,
at one point, did ask for euthanasia. Later on she says, no,
I don't want it, and apparently she wasn't allowed to
change her mind because she had demnion, so they got
to make the choice for her. There's also evidence that
in countries with euthanasia prote call that there do tend

(01:14:02):
to be more abuses by physicians of people who do
not have the ability to make the choice themselves. So
what would you call non voluntary euthanasias of a person's
in a coma of a person you know, doesn't have
the ability to make the choice. It seems like physicians
are more frequently putting them to death than they would otherwise.

(01:14:25):
And again not just by withdrawing, not just by with
drawing treatment. That's because, for one thing, the judicial system
in the Netherlands, the judicial system has sort of led
the way for the put for euthanasia in the Netherlands.
In the nineteen eighties and nineties, there was no law
permitting euthanasia. It was still technically illegal. The courts allowed it,

(01:14:48):
and they even not only allowed it, they actually grew
up stipulations of here's what has to happen for this
to be legal. And so really they were writing the
law themselves, the courts were, and so a lot of this
was driven by the judicial system. And so if the
judicial system is not gonna, you know, prosecute people, or
if they're not gonna you know, convict people of these things,

(01:15:10):
basically it allows it to happen.

Speaker 1 (01:15:12):
Yeah, whether it's legal or illegal becomes irrelevant because there's
no consequence.

Speaker 2 (01:15:17):
Right, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:15:19):
Very interesting. In the Netherlands, you can euthanize people for
any and for every reason. Is that a fair statement.

Speaker 3 (01:15:29):
Just about as long as they're willing, as long as
they are willing to sign off on it and say
that they want to be euthanized. So people have been
euthanized for eating disorders, people have been euthanized for mental
illnesses of various sorts. People have been euthanized. I think
this was in Belgium. It may not have been in
the Netherlands. Maybe in Belgium, but in either Belgium or
the Netherlands, people have been euthanized who were in prison

(01:15:51):
and who claimed that being imprisoned was a painful situation
for them and they couldn't endure it. So here you have,
you know, talking about cognitive dissonance. You have this situation
where you have capital punishment has been banished by all
European countries or most, I should say most European countries,
certainly Western European countries, so you have no capital punishment

(01:16:12):
because they consider that barbaric. But then they will euthanize
someone who's in prison who claims that their situation is
too painful to deal with any longer. So you've got
people that have been euthanized for quite a variety of reasons.
And in Canada you have the situation where people have
been euthanized who have been able to come up with

(01:16:33):
an excuse of a particular ailment or illness, but the
real reason is they were homeless or threatened with homelessness.
That that's happened. So in fact, there was actually one
case where a guy was asking for medical assistance and
dying or euthanasia because he was afraid of going homeless,
and he actually was eventually befriended by it's someone who's

(01:16:55):
opposed to euthanasia, and he was actually convinced not to
do and he wrote a book about it and everything.
But there are people who have been, you know, threatened
with homelessness who've said that that's why they want to
get euthanasia. Usually they have to have some other kind
of excuse, and if they have some of the kind
of ailment, they use that as their excuse not to
do it. But the real reason why that again this
you get euthanized because of loneliness, and again you have

(01:17:18):
to have usually have some other kind of excuse to
do it, but sometimes that's the reason.

Speaker 1 (01:17:22):
Yeah. So I was going to get into this a
little later, but I want to ask you now autonomy.
I mean, if you say someone can't do it, aren't
you infringing on their autonomy? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:17:32):
That's interesting question because the autonomy argument being one of
the strongest arguments according to philosophers, that's the strongest argument
for assisted suicide and euthanasia. But what's interesting, well, number
of things interesting about that. Well, one is that why
are they having physicians do it?

Speaker 1 (01:17:47):
Then?

Speaker 3 (01:17:48):
You know, why is it physician assisted suicide? Obviously there's
someone else involved. It's not just the individual economy the person. Yeah,
the person is not doing it themselves. Now, with assisted suicide,
you are writing a prescription and you know the person
is taking the pills themselves, So in that sense, they're
doing it themselves. But a physician has to write that
prescription and the physician gets to decide whether to do

(01:18:09):
it or not. The physician doesn't you know that the
person who is asking for assistant suicide has to get
permission from the physician. They have to get the prescription
from them. They have to be they have to get
the physician to sign off on it. So there's it's
not really autonomy. Autonomy would be anyone could get it
for any reason whatsoever. You know, some again, a teenager

(01:18:30):
who you know gets bullied by their classmates, you know,
I guess you'd say, let's say, if they're eighteen, okay,
so they're at least they're not a miner or something.
You know, if anyone over eighteen to say, if they're
you know, they're getting bullied by their classmates or something
like that, Okay, you know, let them have it. You know,
that autonomy would be with the side. So it's not
really autonomy. Where's the physicians get to decide. Also, the

(01:18:50):
laws are deciding too by telling you, you know, if
you're and by the way, laws always limit our autonomy.
Think about it, the seat belt law. Why do we
have seat belt law law to protect us from ourselves?
Because we don't we are prone not to do things
sometimes that might be safe for us. So the government
mandates that we do safety, certain kind of safety things. Well,

(01:19:14):
you know, the government can legitimately mandate that we not
kill ourselves too. As part of that so you know,
we're not autonomous in that sense. The law always is
infringing on our autonomy, and we're not a law to ourself.
Autonomy literally means being a law to yourself nolmost as
law auto is self, So you're a self law, but
we're not self laws. And also the other issue with

(01:19:36):
autonomy is the issue of pressure, both the law itself
exerting pressure that wasn't there before. If there's no law
for assistant suicide and euthanasia, then they're not the temptation
for it. Well, there could be the temptation for it
to some degree, but not as big a temptation for it.
But also there's a social pressure of other people. We're

(01:19:57):
not islands, you know, we're not just here all by ourselves.
We mentioned this earlier in the podcast too. We were
talking about the fact that you know, there's people that
are pressuring other.

Speaker 2 (01:20:07):
People to get.

Speaker 3 (01:20:09):
Assistant suicide and euthanists, sometimes not overt, at least sometimes
it is overt, usually not overt. Usually it's more subtle
and such, but you know, they feel pressured by other
people or they feel like I feel like I'm being
a burden to others. Well that's not autonomy. If you're
feeling like you're a burden to someone else and that's
why you're committing suicide, that's not autonomous. That means you're

(01:20:30):
not just doing it because of your own self, you're
doing it because of other people. And so there's a
lot of problems with the autonomy argument because it just
doesn't work.

Speaker 1 (01:20:39):
Talk about the life and the legacy of Jack Kavorkian.
I think any discussion on euthanasia has to involve doctor Death.

Speaker 3 (01:20:47):
Yeah, Jack Kovorkian actually in many ways set back the
Euthanasian mood. Many of the people of the Euthanasian were
actually embarrassed by Kavorkian because he was so radical in
his approach and so radical in his desire to promote death,
and that's why he got the nickname doctor Death, which
he had actually been before he started his suicide. I

(01:21:10):
think he was fascinated with death, and he was studying death,
and even before he's doing scientific research and things medical
research about death before he even began his suicide machines
that he did to put people to death. But then
in the nineteen nineties when he began actually putting people
to death, of course, it created a big splash. He
got a lot of media attention for helping people commit suicide,

(01:21:34):
and there were court paces of course, over and he
was prosecuted a couple of cases he was not convicted,
but then finally he went ahead and himself pushed the
button where he was not just helping someone else commit suicide,
he actually was doing it himself, which is euthanasia. And
at that point he was convicted. And also Michigan, where

(01:21:55):
he was also tightened up their laws in the nineteen
nineties also past laws restricting because there were a lot
of laws where it wasn't illegal necessarily to help someone
commit suicide, not explicitly that is, And so Michigan actually
did pass an anti assistant suicide law in the nineteen
nineties in relation to Kavorkian. And again because of Kavorkian's

(01:22:20):
a lot of the press he got tended to give
people a very negative view of him and of Euthanasian
assistant suicide. So a lot of people in the assisted
suicide movement tried to distance themselves from Cavorkian and his antics.

Speaker 1 (01:22:35):
What is the state of bioethics in general.

Speaker 3 (01:22:40):
Well, bioethics like our academic and scholastic world on the
whole does tend to become more and more secular in
its outlook, more accepting of ideas about abortion, infanticide, euthanasia,
also transhumanism also, which we haven't discussed here as well,

(01:23:04):
the notions that we as humans need to sort of
evolve ourselves up to a higher level, create ourselves into
being something even higher than the humans are today. And
by the way, that gets in those issues of equality
that we're talking about earlier too, because the issues of okay,
what happens if we, you know, evolve ourselves to a
higher level, you know, create a superhuman you know, or

(01:23:26):
again they call transhuman you know, going non humanity. There's
a lot of bioweathers. In fact that there's the Jullion
uh Sabilescu who's the editor of the Journal of Biomedical Ethics.
He's a big promoter of transhumanism and is also a
supporter of working and fanticide and or at least I
shouldn't say fantasid. I'm not sure if he's supports that.

(01:23:47):
I think he does, but I'm not positive and uh
euthanasia and such. So bioethics community is largely in support
of these kinds of ideas. There are, of course those
within the bioethics community that are pushing back to There
are people that have Judeo Christian values in the bioex community,
but they're a minority and they're sort of.

Speaker 2 (01:24:06):
Swinging against the stream.

Speaker 1 (01:24:08):
Yeah, so the obvious question, would you call Oregon sort
of the suicide tourism capital of the US?

Speaker 3 (01:24:17):
Well, interestingly Oregon only I think it was last year
if I recall correctly, maybe two years ago, but I
think it was last year. Oregon opened up themselves to
suicide tourism by striking down the requirement that you had
to be a citizen. There was, of course, the spectacular
case that the media glamorized the Brittany Maynard back in
the middle twenty tens. I forgot the exact year, but

(01:24:41):
she was not allowed to go to Oregon amidst suicide
without establishing citizenship there first, so she did. She actually
moved to Oregon long enough to establish residency in Oregon.
Residency's the right word, not citizenship, But she established residency
in Oregon so she could then kill herself, and the

(01:25:01):
media made her a glamorous, heroic figure in everything for
doing that. And everything. California at that time did not
allow assisted suicide. She was from California and Oregon again
you had to establish residency. Well, now, just recently, Oregon
has now opened it up to where non residents can

(01:25:22):
seek assisted suicide. So it remains to be seen. We
don't know what the statistics are going to look like
and how many people are actually going to go there
to get assisted suicide, but it's now open that they
can do that if they want to. I think there's
also I'm not positivists, but I think there's another state
in the East that also allows assistant suicide for non citizens.

(01:25:42):
I don't want to name the state because I'm not
one hundred percent sure.

Speaker 1 (01:25:46):
You started commenting on this earlier on in the podcast,
but in the book you offer three arguments to demonstrate
the validity of the slippery slope argument, the slippery slope
argument against assistant suicide, and a way to go over
each one of them, because I think they're so important

(01:26:06):
ideas of consequences and not understanding the consequences of ideas
is dangerous. The first point is the denial of human equality.

Speaker 3 (01:26:17):
Yeah, it's once and we've talked about this extensively just
a little bit ago. You know that once you deny
human equality, you know, there's nowhere to go in terms
of where you draw the line for that, and so
that's the big problem. But uh, it's very clear that
people who are pushing for youth and Asian assistant suicide
are denying human equality because they're saying some people deserve protection.

(01:26:39):
And again we discussed this in relation to suicide. You know,
anti suicide laws, you know, so you know anti suicide laws.
You know, we protect the people who are and we
try you know, we put up these barriers on the
Golden gate Bridge, you know, so people can't throw themselves
off the Golden Gate Bridge to commit suicide. We do
all these different things. We spend lots of money, you know,
to keep people from committing suicide. But then we say

(01:27:01):
that these other category of people who will actually help
commit suicide. So we're denying human equality in that sense.
We're saying these people are worthwhile and valuable and these
people are not. You know, these people will help dispense
with them. So that's where the problem comes in. And
once you do that, then it can open up to
bigger and bigger categories too. Again, as we've seen in

(01:27:25):
the Netherlands and Belgium and such, you've had it for
the longest time, they do tend to be opening up
to greater greater characis.

Speaker 2 (01:27:31):
Canada.

Speaker 3 (01:27:32):
Also, Canada was originally supposed to allow people with mental
illnesses to have medical assistance in dying or euthanasia earlier
this year, but they actually postponed it. So fortunately they're
not allowing that yet dust for mental illnesses. Although again
even in the United States, we have situations where people
with mental illnesses have of various sorts have been given

(01:27:55):
assisted suicide. And again sometimes it's because they expand the
categories different ways. So let me give you an example
here too about how that works out in terms of
human equality. So, in Colorado, a physician has prescribed assisted
suicide pills to people with eating disorders. And the reason

(01:28:16):
that this was legally permissible was because the physician argued
that with their eating disorder, they would die within six
months if they continued not eating, which was what they
were not doing, and so they said, they have it's
a terminal illness, you know, and eating disorder is a
terminal illness because if you don't eat, you're not you're

(01:28:37):
gonna die. So this way, those people were then decided
to be less valuable really than other people, because we
allow them to build themselves and not others. So it
opens up to people with mental illnesses, It opened up
feel of physical disabilities, and the categories sort of widen
as time goes on, it seems. And again we see
this happening historically too, and in things historically, you know,

(01:29:00):
especially since the late twentieth century, since nineteen eighty to nineties,
we do see the categories expanding over time and becoming
larger and larger. So once you deny human equality, you know,
basically it's up to you know your own subjective opinion
about you know, where to draw the line of who's
valuable and who is not.

Speaker 1 (01:29:19):
Trudeau, is it fair to say that he is a
champion a cheerleader for euthanasia.

Speaker 2 (01:29:26):
Oh, yeah, he is.

Speaker 3 (01:29:27):
He did help investigate that situation I talked about earlier,
where that corporal had not received funding for her wheelchair ramp.
He was kind of horrified by that particular issue. He
doesn't want people to have to seek assistant suicide or
euthanasia because of poverty or something like that. Although again
that is happening in Canada with homelessness and poverty and

(01:29:49):
the kinds of things. But he definitely is a champion
of it in relation to people who are suffering with
illnesses of various sourds and again and including mental illnesses,
although again they did postpone the mental illness thing too,
So the Trudeau's government did postpone that one as well.
So it remains to be seen how far they're willing
to go with it, but certainly he's been a big
supporter of euthanasia.

Speaker 1 (01:30:11):
Your point to visa via the slippery slope argument, the
pressure to end one's life.

Speaker 3 (01:30:16):
Your comments, Yeah, in the slipper slope argument, I talked
about the pressure of legalization itself. In the second next
chapter on autonomy, I talk about the pressure of social
pressure of other people that we already talked about a
little bit with autonomy. But actually, just legalizing resistant suicide
opens up the slippery slope because before it was legalized,

(01:30:37):
people didn't have that option, and so it opened up
the possibilities for things that before weren't possible, and so
in that sense, it sort of slides you down the
slippery slope further toward greater and again greater categories of
people being included in the legalization. And once you legalize it,
and again, historically this has worked itself out. Even if logically,

(01:31:01):
you know, logically and actually I think I say this
in the book, if I recall correctly, logically, the slippery
slope armument may not quite hold because there are ways
which you could say, Okay, we're going to stop here.
You know, we're gonna you know, draw the line here
and we're not going to go any further. But historically
it doesn't work that way. Historically, once you open the door,

(01:31:21):
you know, it tends to open the door to more
and more categories because you don't have any clear reason
of why you're going to stop there. Why are you
going to stop at six months, Why are you going
to stop at terminal illnesses, why are you going to
stop at those particular categories. There's no clear rational reason
to give that is compelling. So that just opens it up.

(01:31:42):
Then you can go further down. So once you legalize it,
then that just opens the door to greater and greater
categories being included over time. And again we've seen that
happen historically.

Speaker 1 (01:31:54):
Yeah, and then the third point you make is the
alteration of the role of physician in healthcare. And I
think this is an incredibly significant point.

Speaker 3 (01:32:07):
Think of a commentary on Yeah, this is very powerful
because again we talked earlier about the Hippocratic oath, which
physicians used to have to swear.

Speaker 2 (01:32:17):
I don't think they do anymore.

Speaker 3 (01:32:19):
But the Hippocratic oath, they were supposed to uphold life.
They were supposed to stand up for life and uphold
the right to life. And what's happening now with the
putch for Euthanasian system suicide. It's physicians are being recruited
to be the ones to end the life. And so
it blurred the distinction between Okay, now I have this

(01:32:42):
h this person here who is in the hospital, and
the physician comes in, you know, and the person, you know,
whatever state they.

Speaker 2 (01:32:54):
May be in.

Speaker 3 (01:32:56):
Ah, you know, is the physician going to save their
life or are they going to kill them? You know,
It's like we're giving them a new kind of choice.
It needs to be obvious. It used to be, of course,
you're going to save their life. If you can, you
do your best to save their life. Now it's not
so clear.

Speaker 2 (01:33:13):
It's not anymore.

Speaker 3 (01:33:14):
Now the physician's role has been changed to where now
sometimes they might be called upon to end the life.
And there are some physicians who actually are glorying in that.
There are some physicians who are making it their primary
task to end life now too. That's actually happening in places.
And to be sure, there are still a lot of

(01:33:35):
physicians who refuse to go along with the euthanasian assistant
suicide things. You're not required in most places, although by
the way, in Canada there's a lot of pressure and
there are places that are being required facilities that are
being required offer euthanasia, including Catholic hospitals and things like
that who oppose it. But in the United States, in

(01:33:58):
the States, their auditions are not required to offer assisted
suicide in Oregon and Washington and California, but they're allowed to.
And one interesting case that I discussed in my book
is the case of a physician who talk to a
woman out of getting assisted suicide.

Speaker 2 (01:34:17):
Because he didn't believe in it.

Speaker 3 (01:34:18):
And so there aren't still physicians who are out there
trying to rescue people from assisted suicide and euthanasia, but
again by allowing them to do it, to blurs of distinction,
and when you go to countries like again Netherlands and Belgium, Luxembourg.
More and more physicians are becoming involved as time goes on.
In fact, it's some majority of physicians now that are
either involved or say they are willing to be involved.

(01:34:40):
In the United States, I understanding, I think it's still
a minority even in Oregon if I recall correctly. I'm
not one hundred percent sure on that one either, but
I'm pretty sure still a minority physicians even in Oregon
who are willing to do assisted suicide right for scriptions
for it, but still it alters that role where they
have now this new dimension of Okay, do I save

(01:35:00):
this life? Do I build a person or allow them
to take their own life? What do I suggest to them?
And you know what are you trying to suggest them?

Speaker 2 (01:35:08):
You know?

Speaker 3 (01:35:09):
And so now it's you know, we'll let them decide,
you know. Well, you know that's not physicians used to
be trying to save their lives if that's possible to do.

Speaker 1 (01:35:16):
Yeah, you know, we oftentimes use this cliche last but
not least, but I think it really applies to your book.
The closing argument or the conclusion of your book is
a chapter or section called redefining death with dignity. Let
me quote here quote it is far better to offer

(01:35:38):
people love and compassion than help in ending their lives.
Another quote, Let's choose to be courageous and compassionate as
we help people choose life rather than death. Expand on that.

Speaker 3 (01:35:54):
Yeah, it's you know, and again I'm experiencing this myself,
you know, in dealing with my ninety one year old
mother in law, who you know, requires a great deal
of love and attention to help her in her times
of dementia.

Speaker 2 (01:36:06):
But this is what.

Speaker 3 (01:36:06):
God's called us to, you know. God has called us
to love your neighbor as yourself. You know, how do
you want to be treated? You know, that's how we're
supposed to be treating other people. And so, you know,
I believe this is they're a euthanasia protection coalition in Canada,
that it's spearheaded that youth is the term compassion, you know,

(01:36:28):
not compassion, not choice. I think is there Moniker anyway
something like that. But the point is we should be
offering compassion to people, and in a lot of cases,
again it's not even just pain that these people are suffering.
In fact, I was just when I was just flipping
through my book earlier today, I came across one of
the things that I'd written there where a person who

(01:36:50):
actually said, outright, you know, I could probably bear this
suffering if I had people around me, you know, who
were with me, and you know who loved me, and
such and so love and cop and can do an
awful lot in terms of healing the real inner struggles
that people are having even as they're facing things. Because
there's a lot of people even who do end up

(01:37:11):
going through with Euthanasian assistant suicide, who aren't conflicted. You know,
same thing with abortion by the way, too, But there's
a lot of people that are conflicted over these things.
And if someone would come along who would show them
some love and compassion, they might be willing to go
through that suffering. They might be able, might be the
right better word there, to go through that suffering with

(01:37:33):
the help that they would receive. Then, and as we
try to give to people, then not only the love
but also the hope of that God gives us as well,
And this can go a long way toward getting people through,
you know, their tribulations and trials and sufferings. Just like
you mentioned with your dad, you know who you know

(01:37:54):
said that there's a purpose here. You know, God's going
to use this, you know, for his own purposes. And so,
you know, I believe, really believe that that as we
struggle with these issues, and again they're not they're not
easy issues.

Speaker 1 (01:38:06):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:38:06):
Again, I'm dealing with the hero of my dementia and
they're not easy issues to deal with. Pain and suffering
are real, you know, they're not just something to be
you know, you know, get over it. That's not that's
not the right response. The right response is not just
to say, well, just go, you know, just endure it,
just get over just know. The right response is we
need to sort of try to and suffer with them.

(01:38:27):
And by the way, that's what the word compassion literally mean.
The word compassion literally means suffering with a person, and
that's where we need to be going. We need to
be suffering with people. And the Bible says that that
if someone is crying, you cry with them, you know, suffering,
you suffer with them. If they're cheerful, you're cheerful with them.

(01:38:47):
But you know, so we need to be with people
and showing them the love and compassion that God has
shown to us.

Speaker 1 (01:38:53):
I couldn't help think about my sister Jobie. She's just
one year older than I am. She's going on four
years struggling with pancreatic cancer, and I would argue that
she probably has had the most productive four years in
her life while she's been going through this battle with
pancreatic cancer. Through this battle, she has helped more people,

(01:39:17):
including myself, to come to a true valuation of things
in many areas of life. And so you see, on
the one hand, you could say her, I mean she's
got terminal illness. Very few people are going to survive
pancreatic cancer. On the other hand, I mean her life
has been fruitful, abundant, abiding fruit during this period of life.

(01:39:37):
And so I couldn't help but think about her when
I was reading through your book and thinking about the
value of this book. You have the unique gift of
being a very very clear communicator on a podcast like this,
but also a very easy person to digest. When you're writing.
You write about complex subjects, but you take the cookies

(01:40:00):
from the top shelf and bring them down to the
bottom shelves so all of us can enjoy them. And
I really am deeply grateful to you for writing this book.
I think it's a very important subject, oftentimes overlooked, but
this is a critical piece of the puzzle in any society.

Speaker 2 (01:40:19):
Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:40:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:40:20):
I did have some help from some editors too, by
the way.

Speaker 1 (01:40:22):
Well we all do in our writing. But I am
deeply grateful Richard for this book, Unnatural Death, Medicine's Descent
from Healing to Killing. The book available through the ministry
of the Christian Research Institute. All you have to do
is check it out on the web at equipped dot
org or stand with us shoulder to shoulder in the
Battle for life and truth Post of us box eighty

(01:40:44):
five hundred, Sharlott, North Carolina, zip code two eight two
seven to one theweb, Equipped dot org. Richard, thank you
so much for your time on the podcast, for writing
the book from making a difference while there's yet time.
We deeply appreciate you.

Speaker 3 (01:41:00):
Thanks for having me on. I appreciate you tooe.

Speaker 1 (01:41:02):
Deep, deep privilege and pleasure. And again, if you enjoyed
the podcast, subscribe rate review. It helps a lot. Thanks
for tuning in to this edition of handkum Plug. Look
forward to seeing you next time with more of the podcasts.
So long for now

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