Global effort to legalize private killing!

LONDON, England - November 17, 2009 - The push is on around the world to legalize "a broad array of private killing" no matter whether it is being called "assisted suicide" or outright euthanasia, U.S. lawyer and anti-euthanasia campaigner Wesley J. Smith told an audience in London last night.

At a lecture to anti-euthanasia activists at the Cadogan Hotel, Smith said that the distinction between assisted suicide and outright euthanasia is becoming academic. He said the two "are like one leg following the other when walking."

The push for euthanasia is based on a two-part ideology, he said. First, that killing is an acceptable solution to human suffering, and second, that autonomy is the highest personal good. This ideology represents a radical remaking of society's traditional values, from those predicated on equality of the person to one in which "people's lives exist on different tiers of value."

Smith criticized the criteria used by the UK's Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) in recently issued draft guidelines on the application of the assisted suicide law, saying they are the same as those being used in a Scottish bill that proposes to legalize assisted suicide. Both the bill and the guidelines propose that assisting suicide should not be prosecuted where the deceased was terminally ill, neurologically degenerating, or seriously physically disabled.

He pointed out that the 2002 law allowing euthanasia in the Netherlands had its origins in prosecutorial guidelines that were relaxed in the 1970s at the behest of judges.