December 7, 2003 

By "Terrasol" 

intihuaca@yahoo.com 

I answered a poster on the freerepublic board and thought you might find it interesting: 

Thank you for poignant information about the ubiquitous death culture active in current policy drives. Names like "Last Act" and "Partnership for Caring" have a benevolent, almost sanctified quality. The ideas they spearhead are anything but. As likely beneficiaries of the right-to-die drive, corporate entities in the hospice business are major participants in state lobbying campaigns. Whenever businesses are pushing for policy changes, there is a profit motive. Because hospice businesses have dying people as client base, the easing of laws against initiated death is a matter of profit. 

Another business group gaining from lifted restrictions includes health insurers, SSI, medicare and medicaid. Besides lobbying state legislatures, a major effort of the right-to-die proponents is in the area of public indoctrination. Base sentiments are stirred by terms like "right" that invoke images of struggle against injustice. More emotion gets generated through words like "dignity" and "last acts". Both convey private prerogative and mobilize public will toward protecting presumably threatened interests. 

Suggestible amphibian brains are turned vigilant toward a hypothetical physician order bent on hindering natural death. This selling of dictatorial physicians is the more remarkable because the organized medical fraternity is itself a beneficiary of more relaxed euthanasia laws. 

The clichi "national healthcare crisis" is merely a cover for the general cost ceiling. Simple arithmetic shows that more patients will divide the limited cash pie into more units, driving assignable cost down. Fewer patients conversely move the assignable cost upward. Organized medicine understandably shuns lowering its financial niveaux. Therefore reducing the number of healthcare recipients is a matter of business prudence. 

Since policy boards inform physicians, the right-to-die ideology is easily disseminated through journals and newsletters. Those not amenable to instruction run the risk of being labeled anti-progressive and become subject to smear campaigns aimed at their professional competence. 

The voices of physicians staying within the sanctioned line become relay points for inducting the public mind into the paradigm of enlightened scientific views. This ostensible enlightenment combines with the visceral drive to protect "rights", leading to suicidal public complacency toward policies that are utterly detrimental to individual sovereignty. 

A 1989 report in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested informing patients about drugs suitable for suicide. Among the 12 collaborating physicians was Dr. Ronald Cranford. The Associate Professor of Neurology then moonlighted giving paid testimony in favor of terminating the lives of incapacitated persons. 

Fancying himself a medical ethicist, Dr. Cranford got himself elected to the Ethics Committee of the American Academy of Neurology. To the uninformed, this signifies that he is an ethical physician. The gullible public mind easily transfers this veneer of respectability to Dr. Cranford's macabre projects: The Hastings Center's "Guidelines on Termination of Treatment and the Care of the Dying", "Guidelines for State Court Decision Making in Authorizing or Withholding Life-Sustaining Medical Treatment" and Cranford's contribution to the book "Intended Death: The Ethics of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia". None of these necrophilic endeavors by the ethical doctor draws public scorn. 

In addition to ideological crawl of pseudo enlightenment, there is also a concerted media campaign, a new phase of which will launch on December 8 in Tallahassee. The idea is to soften the public mind toward acceptance of a Brave Dead World to come. 

A pertinent press release may be seen at: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/031205/laf025_1.html "In an effort to encourage a national discussion about end-of-life choices, the nation's oldest and largest right-to-die organization will launch a national campaign Monday (December 8, 2003) beginning in Tallahassee."

Mergers of euthanasia groups as Last Acts and Partnership for Caring facilitate stepped-up propaganda under the nomenclature of advocacy for the dying. Because of the degree of public stupefaction already achieved, these organizations can admit with impunity that they are dedicated to promoting social change." 

The clueless public reads this as upcoming betterment, instead of seeing it as flagrant usurpation of individual sovereignty. In classic propaganda fashion the subversion is presented as "empowerment" of the individual. "Together, we are empowering and engaging consumers, informing medical and health professionals, and acting as advocates for quality end-of-life care through policy reform."