By Judie Brown
The Fifth Commandment, as delivered to Moses by God, is simple: Thou shalt not kill!
So why can’t people seem to comprehend and follow this command? We could ask literally thousands upon thousands of people and get responses that would convince you that hardly anyone today realizes that killing someone else—especially someone not yet born or someone suffering a life-threatening illness—offends God and is a sin.
Take the state of Texas right now. According to Texas Right to Life, “Although there is not a current movement in Texas to legalize physician-assisted suicide, the rights of vulnerable patients are under attack by an unprecedented, unethical, and unconstitutional Texas statute. Section 166.046 of the Texas Health and Safety Code permits physicians and hospitals to withhold or withdraw basic life-sustaining treatment from a patient against the will of the patient, his family, or his surrogate. The patient is only given 10 days to find another facility to which to transfer before the hospital can legally forcibly remove treatment.”
But pro-life groups have united and are acting to ensure that medical ethics in Texas are no longer violated at the expense of innocent people’s lives. In a joint statement, the organizations make it clear that the 10-day rule must be repealed.
On a related matter, physician Ezekiel Emanuel, architect of Obamacare, recently said that “cumulatively from 2010 to 2017 the ACA reduced health care spending a total of $2.3 trillion.” As many of us know, he is the doctor who advocated for withholding care for the aging and dying, not to mention his support of death panels. Such panels are consulting groups in various hospitals that take the decision-making away from patients, encouraging loved ones that it is time for the ailing family member to die. The end result is money saved and people dead who may have lived longer and had more time with their loved ones. Is something fishy in Emanuel’s remarks? And why did his comments come about the very week the Trump Department of Justice asked an appeals court to strike down Obamacare? You do the math!
On another front, the American Nurses Association is apparently planning to drop its opposition to assisted suicide, while changing the term itself to “aid-in-dying.” That term is approved by none other than the pro-euthanasia Compassion & Choices organization!
So you see, the pro-death forces never sleep. They are constantly seeking out clever ways to excuse folks from life, including using the argument that a patient is “brain dead” and convincing family members to allow his organs to be harvested. During a recent interview, Doyen Nguyen, MD explained that “‘brain death’ has been a medical fiction from its very inception. The evidence for this can be found in the manuscript-drafts of the Ad Hoc Harvard Committee report which introduced ‘brain death’ on August 5, 1968.”
And there you have it! So many people with agendas that disregard the Fifth Commandment deny that killing innocent people is a sin, and they do it all in the name of cost-saving medicine.
In 1938 James T. Neary wrote in the Linacre Quarterly that “the end of medical science is to save human life, not to stop it at its source, and not to end disease and suffering by slaying the patient.”
Wiser words have never been written. And so we ask, why isn’t every medical professional taking the fifth seriously?
Thou shalt not kill—four simple words that seem nearly impossible to obey!
God help us all.