The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Link: Doctors face prison for denying right to die | the Daily Mail.

First the Labour Party denied us the right to free speech, criminalising what we say. Then, by penalising “hate crimes” more severely than others, they made clear that some lives are more valuable than others. Then they claimed ownership of our bodies. Their ID Card legislation entitles them to assault us intimately to take our “biometric data.”

Their intellectuals speculate as to whether an old person might have a duty to die to relieve younger family members of the “burden” they have become (making it easier to pay mortgages and taxes). Now, with dark and inexorable logic, they impose on doctors a duty – a legal obligation – to kill by withdrawing medical care.

Did they ever grant such “rights” or impose such “duties” without later broadening them? How long before those families with mortgages and taxes to pay have the “right” to demand that doctors kill their stricken relatives? How long after that before hospital managements can order death by way of “rational allocation of resources?”

Doctors, let’s not deny it, have sometimes taken the decision – in consultation with patients and family – to withdraw life support. That was a matter for their consciences. But now those consciences have been nationalised, expropriated, brought under State control.

Today, Labour sets out to harden the consciences of doctors. Soon enough, when those consiences are sufficiently calloused, they will turn them into executioners.

Could anything make more clear the moral abyss into which the Labour Party has fallen? Ultimately, the abstract love of ones fellow man which some Socialists feel (and others pretend to feel for electoral advantage) is not merely a lesser version of love; it is its antithesis.