HB 1283, relative to end of life options, is currently before the House. The bill would, for the first time, legalize physician-assisted suicide in New Hampshire, albeit under “limited” circumstances. History shows us this bill – if it passes – will only be the first step in making state-sanctioned “suicide” an accepted norm, ushering in forcible euthanasia of vulnerable people against their will.
While some claim legalizing assisted suicide advances “personal liberty,” this ignores reality, reflecting naivety of human nature and the crude realities of power. The fact is wherever state-sanctioned suicide is widespread, it is automatically seized upon by those in power to justify widespread, involuntary executions of the elderly and infirm. Those self-proclaimed libertarians who advance assisted suicide are, in reality, expanding the power of the state to murder the financially inconvenient.
In his book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, United States Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch painstakingly documents that – after the Netherlands legalized assisted suicide in the 1980s – doctors immediately seized on the law to involuntarily slaughter sick and dying people on an industrial scale. He shows that “the total number of intentional killings without patient consent in 1990 was 9,750, or 7.56 percent of all deaths [in the Netherlands].”
Gorsuch concludes that, if Dutch policies were adopted across the United States, 173,650 people who never consented to be killed would be murdered by doctors annually. If we extrapolate to New Hampshire’s current death rate, this would produce about 60 involuntary killings per year in the Granite State alone.
Gorsuch writes that the logic of assisted suicide and euthanasia tends inevitably “to justify the sacrifice of the few for the supposed benefit of the many.” The right to die becomes a duty to die.
Western Europe has not improved since the 1990s. The UK government now routinely uses physical force to kill those with a low probability of surviving. Since 2017, UK judges and doctors have used the police to slaughter sick toddlers, infants, and teenagers against their parents’ wishes.
In 2017, British baby Charlie Gard – just under one year old – was given an 11% chance of survival by the Chief of the Neuromuscular Division at Columbia University Medical Center, who offered to treat Charlie in the United States.
Charlie’s parents, faithful Christians, embraced Charlie’s 11% chance of survival because they see life as a divine gift to be fought for.
In contrast: Britain’s atheist doctors and judges believe that life has no value, the “compassionate” option is always to err on the side of ending pain rather than saving life. Research reveals atheist doctors are twice as likely to hasten the deaths of sick patients.
Citing his low chances of survival, British courts placed Charlie under arrest to prevent his American doctor from saving his life. The UK even prevented Charlie’s parents from taking him on a last picnic, forcing them to eat with their dying child on the hospital roof. Under international media coverage, Charlie was slowly executed by his doctors, while the British public stood by. There have been similar stories with other UK babies and toddlers, including Alfie Evans and Indi Gregory.
Recently, a sick 19-year-old in the UK who sought experimental treatment, was instead placed under arrest at her hospital and ordered to die by a UK court. The young woman – known only as “ST” – a Christian, told the media “I want to die trying to live.” In contrast, the British government seeks to execute the sick and vulnerable because it views all life as the pointless prolongation of death, placing these children on the altar of death to exalt death itself.
The atrocities now being committed by Britain’s government represent a depth of evil rarely seen in modern history. Even totalitarian regimes generally try to conceal such acts rather than committing them openly. And, when dictators do blatantly commit murder, they typically have an excuse less transparently evil than the sheer exaltation of death.
Those who would open the door for euthanasia should consider that the West is facing the advent of a Satanic value system representing an inversion of Christian beliefs about the sanctity of life and our duty to protect the least of these.
In New Hampshire, any vote to “legalize” assisted suicide and euthanasia is – as a matter of historical reality – a vote to mandate it. It is a vote to unleash the politics and the forces that exalt death into the machinery of the state and against the most vulnerable members of our society.
New Hampshire legislators who vote for assisted suicide and euthanasia should not hide behind the technical phrasing of any bill. If they do, they will be hiding from the inevitable consequences of their own decision and from the darkness they will be releasing upon our communities and upon our children.
Pictured: Charlie Gard, a baby who was publicly murdered by UK judges and doctors to exalt death.
