While some states in the US allow euthanasia, it is reserved for people at the end of their lives. Belgium, apparently, takes a different approach. There, doctors can help patients who have "an incurable illness that causes them unbearable physical or mental suffering" to commit suicide. This has led to a remarkable rise in assisted suicides since this law has passed. Of course, while some who decided to end their lives were truly suffering, it seems that many were afflicted with ills caused only by a culture in which they could not find reason to live.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/0...-treatment
In Belgium, secular humanism has become a religion.
Humanism has replaced the church. But, unlike the church, it cannot supply an answer on why to keep living. Instead, with its focus on individual autonomy, the answer is assisted suicide.
The Netherlands and Belgium were the first two countries to legalize gay marriage, which has spread throughout the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_o...x_marriage. Could physician-assisted suicide for patients suffering from an existential crisis be their next export?
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/0...-treatment
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In Belgium and in the Netherlands, where patients can be euthanized even if they do not have a terminal illness, the laws seem to have permeated the medical establishment more deeply than elsewhere, perhaps because of the central role granted to doctors: in the majority of cases, it is the doctor, not the patient, who commits the final act. In the past five years, the number of euthanasia and assisted-suicide deaths in the Netherlands has doubled, and in Belgium it has increased by more than a hundred and fifty per cent. Although most of the Belgian patients had cancer, people have also been euthanized because they had autism, anorexia, borderline personality disorder, chronic-fatigue syndrome, partial paralysis, blindness coupled with deafness, and manic depression. In 2013, Wim Distelmans euthanized a forty-four-year-old transgender man, Nathan Verhelst, because Verhelst was devastated by the failure of his sex-change surgeries; he said that he felt like a monster when he looked in the mirror. “Farewell, everybody,” Verhelst said from his hospital bed, seconds before receiving a lethal injection.
In Belgium, secular humanism has become a religion.
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The right to a dignified death is viewed as an accomplishment of secular humanism, one of seven belief systems that are officially recognized by the government. Belgian humanism, which was deeply influenced by the nineteenth-century Freemasonry movement, offered an outlet for those who felt oppressed by the Church, but it has increasingly come to resemble the kind of institution that it once defined itself against. Since 1981, the Belgian government has paid for “humanist counsellors,” the secular equivalent of clergy, to provide moral guidance in hospitals, prisons, and the armed forces. Humanist values are also taught in state schools, in a course called non-confessional ethics, which is taken by secular children from first through twelfth grade, while religious students pursue theological studies. The course emphasizes autonomy, free inquiry, democracy, and an ethics based on reason and science, not on revelation.
Humanism has replaced the church. But, unlike the church, it cannot supply an answer on why to keep living. Instead, with its focus on individual autonomy, the answer is assisted suicide.
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De Wachter believes that the country’s approach to suicide reflects a crisis of nihilism created by the rapid secularization of Flemish culture in the past thirty years. Euthanasia became a humanist solution to a humanist dilemma. “What is life worth when there is no God?” he said. “What is life worth when I am not successful?” He said that he has repeatedly been confronted by patients who tell him, “I am an autonomous decision-maker. I can decide how long I live. When I think my life is not worth living anymore, I must decide.” He recently approved the euthanasia of a twenty-five-year-old woman with borderline personality disorder who did not “suffer from depression in the psychiatric sense of the word,” he said. “It was more existential; it was impossible for her to have a goal in this life.” He said that her parents “came to my office, got on their knees, and begged me, ‘Please, help our daughter to die.’ ”
The Netherlands and Belgium were the first two countries to legalize gay marriage, which has spread throughout the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_o...x_marriage. Could physician-assisted suicide for patients suffering from an existential crisis be their next export?
