Euthanasia

"I believe often that death is good medical treatment because it can achieve what all the medical advances and technology cannot achieve today, and that is stop the suffering of the patient."

"What does one do with such an old machine? It is thrown on the scrap heap. What does one do with a lame horse, with such an unproductive cow? No, I do not want to continue the comparison to the end--however fearful the justification for it and the symbolic force of it are. We are not dealing with machines, horses and cows whose only function is to serve mankind, to produce goods for man. One may smash them, one may slaughter them as soon as they no longer fulfil this function. No, we are dealing with human beings, our fellow human beings, our brothers and sisters. With poor people, sick people, if you like unproductive people. But have they for that reason forfeited the right to life?"

"If you establish and apply the principle that you can kill 'unproductive' fellow human beings then woe betide us all when we become old and frail! If one is allowed to kill the unproductive people then woe betide the invalids who have used up, sacrificed and lost their health and strength in the productive process. If one is allowed forcibly to remove one's unproductive fellow human beings then woe betide loyal soldiers who return to the homeland seriously disabled, as cripples, as invalids. If it is once accepted that people have the right to kill 'unproductive' fellow humans--and even if initially it only affects the poor defenseless mentally ill--then as a matter of principle murder is permitted for all unproductive people, in other words for the incurably sick, the people who have become invalids through labor and war, for us all when we become old, frail and therefore unproductive."

"All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer hesitate to shorten our woes. A day will come when it will dare and act with certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour, knowing that it has reached its term."

"There are documented cases of patients suffering from depression, the despair of poverty or homelessness, or the lack of access to health services who are offered Medical Assistance in Dying and euthanized. Disabled patients trying to access disability services are being offered Medical Assistance in Dying instead of assistance in gaining necessary services."

"The advocacy group’s euphemistic name, Dying with Dignity, cloaks the fact that its proponents are suggesting killing you, and they are encouraging you to take this course of action by vigorous government-lead advocacy for the process."

"We put down mad dogs; we kill the wild, untamed ox; we use the knife on sick sheep to stop their infecting the flock; we destroy abnormal offspring at birth; children, too, if they are born weak or deformed, we drown. Yet this is not the work of anger, but of reason – to separate the sound from the worthless."

"It would replace love with law, zapping the private and familial goodwill that has normally attended such end-of-life matters and replacing them with the death sanction of the state. This would be bad for the individual who wants to die, bureaucratizing his final moments of life, and it would be bad for those who want to live, too, since it would add up to the state saying: ‘Some lives are worth less than others and thus may legitimately be extinguished.’"