I read a write-up in the paper recently about elderly people in Holland who are now wearing buttons saying: ‘Please don’t kill me’. I expect that we pro-lifers may soon be parading up and down in front of hospitals with signs reading: ‘Euthanasia kills old people’ and ‘Please don’t kill my granny’ and ‘Don’t drink that orange juice, mother, it ain’t what it looks like’.
The acceptance of euthanasia (unless you’re the reluctant victim) is following the same route that brought about the widespread acceptance of abortion. The media talk endlessly about the long, cruel, horrendous deaths of a few elderly people and their goal is to relieve the elderly of their pain by killing them painlessly. (Now doesn’t that sound like ‘therapeutic’ abortions?)
Then there is the old chestnut about the ‘poor girl’ or woman who is forced to have a baby while the man ‘escapes scot free.’ The solution: ‘Kill the baby and free the woman.’ We are being punished for our apathy. Twenty-five yeas ago we failed to stop abortion as a legal alternative to child-bearing and now history appears to be repeating itself – the elderly are in the government’s gun sights.
The elderly may have to go into hospital carrying a skipping rope and talking enthusiastically about going to Florida. This reminds me of the true story of the two elderly golfers. One of them teed off and shacked the ball into the woods and angrily threw down his driver and complained: “I’ve been playing golf for 60 years and I’ve never got any better!” “Stop complaining!” said the other golfer, “They’re a lot of people our age in old peoples’ homes.”
Now comes the good news. Some of our pro-abortion adversaries are coming down on our side. I was picketing outside the Toronto General Hospital recently carrying a large sign that read: “Don’t kill my mother – my brother is the only beneficiary’ when I ran into Henry Morgentaler!
“Morgy!” I cried (we go back a long way), “what are you doing in Canada? I thought you were in Europe killing babies over there?”
“No, ‘Idiot’, (that was always his pet name for me), I have come back here to set up an anti-euthanasia movement.”
I was astounded and asked why.
“I just turned 75 and I’ve been informed by the federal government that I’ve been put on
a list of ‘useless feeders.’
“I was just going to say you don’t look 75. You look 20 years younger!”
“Just 20?” asked Morgentaler poignantly.
“Well,” I replied, “even if you bathe in Grecian Formula – there’s a limit to what it can do for you.”
“Makes jokes. You know what happens when you’re 75. They have that compulsory appointment and you have to talk them out of ‘exiting’ you – as they refer to it. And I failed to talk them out of it. I’ve now appealed their decision. What are you going to do, ‘Idiot,’ when you get to be 75?”
“Well I know that this is hard to believe – but what a coincidence – I happen to work for the federal government in the ‘Useless Feeders Department’. And what I do every year with my birth certificate is that I make up a new one and take a year off. By the time the year 2030 comes along – I’ll be ten years old.”
Morgy looked at me sadly and said: “I knew that I should never have left Europe.”
Morgy grabbed one of my signs and we locked arms and paraded up and down in front of the hospital for hours. He was carrying my favourite sign: ‘Abortion is the doorway to Euthanasia.’
