By Judie Brown
The lines from this Dylan Thomas poem ring particularly true today. The poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” begins:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Thomas is said to have written the poem because his father was facing the prospect of dying. This is why the poem came to my mind today. You see, a recent crime blog reports that “the owner of a Frisco [Texas] medical company regularly directed nurses to overdose hospice patients with drugs such as morphine to speed up their deaths and maximize profits, and sent text messages like, ‘You need to make this patient go bye-bye,’ an FBI agent wrote in an affidavit for a search warrant obtained by NBC 5.”
If this sounds a bit off the wall to you, then you have no clue what the culture of death has in store for those entrusted to the care of healthcare providers in the coming years. Such things have actually been going on for a long time, but usually nobody gets caught. As the New York Times reported nearly 20 years ago, “‘passive euthanasia’ in hospitals is the norm.”
So is it any wonder that today a hospice administrator would try to do his best to see to it that beds are emptied in a fiscally timely way?
Texas Right to Life’s John Seago has it right, saying that morally challenged thinking is at the root of “value judgments being made in the healthcare system in Texas where anti-life ethics are actually what’s considered” rather than the good of the patients themselves.
It is practices like the one in the Texas hospice that have left some medical researchers abroad, and perhaps here as well, arguing “for the right to take organs from euthanasia patients before they die.” Several physicians from the Netherlands and Belgium penned an article extoling the practice.
Writing in the Journal of Medical Ethics, they report valuable unpublished information about the prevalence of the procedure. So far, it has been performed only about 40 times in the two countries. However, there is “a persisting discrepancy between the number of organ donors and the number of patients on the waiting lists for transplantation”—which euthanasia patients could help to balance.
The authors stress that euthanasia is not a cure-all for the organ shortage. Most euthanasia patients suffer from cancer, which is a contraindication for organ transplantation. However, 25 to 30 percent of them do not, so there is obviously a real possibility of expanding the supply.
Furthermore, the authors say, public perception of this formerly abhorrent practice is increasingly positive.
The truth is indeed that public opinion on the question of euthanasia and related practices is becoming more and more favorable as the culture of death packages its wares in kind-sounding phrases that appeal to those whose loved ones are ill or dying. In 2013, a Gallup poll found that “70% of Americans [are] in favor of allowing doctors to hasten a terminally ill patient’s death when the matter is described as allowing doctors to ‘end the patient’s life by some painless means.’ At the same time, far fewer—51%—support it when the process is described as doctors helping a patient ‘commit suicide.’”
In other words, a gullible public is a malleable public, and that is what proponents of direct killing—be it abortion or euthanasia—depend on in order to sell their deadly wares.
And now you know why Dylan’s poem is so very relevant to current news. As that poem concludes:
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Protect your loved ones. Educate yourself and your family, especially if someone you love is suffering. Be the voice they cannot be.
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Combat the evil with truth! Join American Life League in defiance of the culture of our day—this culture of death. Through your actions and words, become a part of our movement to build a culture of life. Pray, be informed, and educate others.
For pro-life information, go to all.org.
For pro-life educational tools including Euthanasia: An Introduction for high school students, visit cultureoflifestudies.com.
To see documented proof of Planned Parenthood’s debauchery and to learn ways to stop its spread, go to stopp.org.
To join with youth outreach for a pro-life generation, go to lifedefender.org.