Consequently, “assisted suicide” is the slipperiest of slopes, and I am convinced that the mind behind the “right to die” narrative is literally diabolical. It is intended to induce our culture to accept the medical killing of children and old people to save money, and it will be expanded far beyond the few hard cases we read about.

*Babies born with serious health problems have their own Medicaid eligibility and may be on Medicaid regardless of the economic situation of the parents–and unless you’re Bill Gates you can’t afford those costs anyway, you’d be bankrupt and possibly eligible for Medicaid on your own account if you had to pay them.

This was something that doctors and families could agree on. It was pretty common until lawyers got involved. My old professor of surgery had a practice in which his terminal breast cancer patients were given increasing doses of steroids, which made them feel better. When they finally could not go on at home, he would admit them to the hospital and “forget” to prescribe steroids. They would die quickly and painlessly of adrenal insufficiency.

I have had a family hold a vote whether to have me do a painful procedure to restart an IV in a terminal relative. They vote something like 3 to 2 to do it so I did as I was told. I have also changed an IV to minimal flow (nurses get nervous when no IV is ordered) in a terminal patient of mine. I had kept her going until her brother could arrive, then after a few days of saying goodbye and with everybody agreeing, I let her slip away. Many of these stories are in my book, “War Stories, 50 years in Medicine.”

That said, people… persons, individually, are within their rights to self-abort at their pleasure, in darkness. However, we should be wary of grooming our medical professionals with a pro-choice… death orientation, which has diverse precedents to force a progressive path and grade.

My sister sustained 3rd degree burns over 50% of her body at age 4. She did not attend school until the 3rd grade. She is now a happy grandmother in her 70s, having married a good man who was not deterred by her scarred breasts and body. Whether she was brave or cowardly in the face of many surgeries for split thickness skin grafts is irrelevant. That she survived is a miracle, absent the antibacterial agents now used in burn therapy. Those decisions and acts were not up to her.She was a child, at the same age as your brother, with the same problem.

Adults in their golden years have a duty, in my eyes, to contemplate their inevitable demise, as I have done and still do. Health care professionals who terminate lives for whatever reason are rightly called murderers, not healers! And suicide is the cowardly way out.
Suffering is undesirable, but unavoidable. That is a lesson the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, taught us from the Cross.

And as for cowardice, I wish those who want to label people like my brother cowards could have seen the way he faced his terrible burn injury at the age of five. A coward, he most certainly was not. Nor was he perfect, nor was he an abstraction who could be summed up by any easy label. He was a human being with all the flaws and sterling qualities of any normal person, who had good reason to be desperately afraid and was trying for all he was worth to deal with his illness in the best way he could find — while knowing that no good solution existed. I think it would be wise for those who have not (yet) been in such a terrible position themselves to be a bit careful about passing such cheap and cavalier judgments on those who have.