The Euthanasia Crowd Keeps Playing With Words
Euthanasia activists are obsessed with lexicon. They believe that if only they can find the right words to use in identifying mercy killing and assisted suicide, people will see the wisdom of their proposal and embrace medicalized homicide.
This obsession with words and terms has marked the euthanasia movement from the very beginning. Indeed, euthanasia, the current word for mercy killing, once meant a pain free natural death, experienced in a state of grace, and ideally, surrounded by family--akin to the modern concept of hospice. But as Professor Ian Dowbiggin noted in his splendid book, A Concise History of Euthanasia, the word was co-opted in one of the first modern essays supporting mercy killing, authored in 1870 by a school teacher named Samuel D. Williams. From Dowbiggin's account:
In advocating voluntary active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, Williams was instrumental in redefining euthanasia as an act of mercy killing rather than a passive process in which the discomforts of death are mitigated but not intentionally ended by pain killers.
(Wesley J. Smith's Complete Article)
This obsession with words and terms has marked the euthanasia movement from the very beginning. Indeed, euthanasia, the current word for mercy killing, once meant a pain free natural death, experienced in a state of grace, and ideally, surrounded by family--akin to the modern concept of hospice. But as Professor Ian Dowbiggin noted in his splendid book, A Concise History of Euthanasia, the word was co-opted in one of the first modern essays supporting mercy killing, authored in 1870 by a school teacher named Samuel D. Williams. From Dowbiggin's account:
In advocating voluntary active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, Williams was instrumental in redefining euthanasia as an act of mercy killing rather than a passive process in which the discomforts of death are mitigated but not intentionally ended by pain killers.
(Wesley J. Smith's Complete Article)
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