The Facts about 'Mercy Killing '
Euthanasia is the deliberate killing of someone by action or omission, with or without that person's consent, for what are claimed to be compassionate reasons.
Assisted Suicide is counseling, abetting, or an act of aiding someone to kill himself or herself. This is sometimes referred to as physician-assisted suicide. For instance, instead of the doctor putting lethal poison in your mouth, he hands you a pill and you do it.
The Slippery Slope - proven by experience of The Netherlands
If euthanasia advocates continue to get their wishes, they will drag Canada, inch by inch, into the same nightmare world already playing itself out in The Netherlands and Switzerland.
In this death culture, the category of those who are "killable" is ever-expanding and will not stop until anybody who wants to kill themselves, can kill themselves, for any reason. At the time they took their first steps to legalize killing, the Dutch and the Swiss medical community proclaimed "strict guidelines". In time, all those guidelines, protocols and "safe guards" proved to be worthless.
"Termination without request or consent", whereby a doctor kills a patient without their explicit consent, is an out of control problem.
No safe guard exists which can defend against the power of human logic which says that if killing is a solution to one problem, it can be a solution to many.
Right to die... or Duty to die?
It is evident that legalizing euthanasia will place undue pressure upon elderly, ill and disabled persons to seek (or accept) euthanasia out of fear that they are "a burden" to family members. Without love and support, loneliness will soon express itself in the mind of many vulnerable people as a "duty" to stop being a burden to relatives who are "too busy to spend all their time on me".
Add the fact that our health care system is near collapse, and one can quickly see how unfair legalizing euthanasia would be for lonely, vulnerable people who feel "guilty" for being "such a cost burden" on our health care system.
Make no mistake; With the legalization of euthanasia and assisted suicide we have, at the same time, institutionalized a duty to die for the weakest members of society. That is immoral and must be opposed.
Spiritual implications
Beyond all the arguments we hear - "compassion", death with dignity, unbearable pain, or slippery slopes, one fact is perhaps the most important. That is, if God exists, if His Word is true, euthanasia or assisted suicide is a grave sin. The 5th Commandment - "Thou shall not kill" allows no exception for "choice". As such it is a serious matter for all who participate in it. If we love ourselves and our brother, then we must avoid any sin that could possibly deprive us (or others) of eternal happiness.