I live in Oregon, the physician-assisted suicide state. We were the first principality in human history to legalize physician-assisted suicide. (Though it was practiced in the Netherlands, it wasn't legal.)
(This article was written before Ballot Measure 16 passed in Oregon in 1995.)
Peter Singer, the Princeton professor, wrote in his ethics textbook, “The life of a fetus is of no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, etc.”
The controversy over the decision of judges to starve her to death is not going away anytime soon—and that’s a good thing.
Today, November 10, 1994, the outcome has been declared official. The state of Oregon became the first jurisdiction in the history of the human race to legalize physician-assisted suicide. Even the Netherlands (which commonly practices it) and Nazi Germany (which practiced it in its involuntary form) were not so bold and presumptuous as to pretend to legitimize it through making it legal. No one on the planet has ever done that until now.
I used this article in a course I taught at Multnomah Bible College—Soc 111, Contemporary Social Ethics.
©1991 - 2012 Eternal Perspective Ministries. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy
