A "fantastic step forward"

British Health (sic) Secretary Jeremy Hunt

From the UK Mail Online:

60,000 patients put on death pathway without being told but minister still says controversial end-of-life plan is 'fantastic' 

Pathway involves the sick being sedated and usually denied nutrition and fluids 

Families kept in the dark when doctors withdraw lifesaving treatment 

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said pathway was a 'fantastic step forward' 

Anti-euthanasia group said: ‘The Pathway is designed to finish people off double quick'

In comments that appeared to prejudge an official inquiry into the LCP, the Health Secretary said ‘one or two’ mistakes should not be allowed to discredit the entire end-of-life system. 

But Elspeth Chowdharay-Best of Alert, an anti-euthanasia group, said: ‘The Pathway is designed to finish people off double quick. It is a lethal pathway.

Up to 60,000 patients die on the Liverpool Care Pathway each year without giving their consent, shocking figures revealed yesterday.
A third of families are also kept in the dark when doctors withdraw lifesaving treatment from loved ones.

Despite the revelations, Jeremy Hunt last night claimed the pathway was a ‘fantastic step forward’...

The pathway involves withdrawal of lifesaving treatment, with the sick sedated and usually denied nutrition and fluids. Death typically takes place within 29 hours.

We have an intimate experience with "end of life systems" in the 20th century. They have been remarkably effective. They always involve these principles: 1) they are targeted against people who are viewed as extraneous or an impediment to progress 2) they are couched in scientific euphemisms-- final solutions, euthanasia, population control, end of life systems... 3) they are portrayed as necessary and inevitable, cloaked in a bureaucratic freight train that few dare resist 4) people who oppose them are labeled as cranks, anti-progress or anti-science.

And this: such "end of life systems" are never-- never-- put in historical context. Each idea is new, pristine, practical, scientific, never done before.

A remarkable and terrifying pattern is emerging. It was first apparent with eugenics, and it is now happening in other anti-human crusades. Evil learns. It refines its methods, across generations, like a science grows more sophisticated with time.

The early eugenicists were crude oafs, explicitly calling for the elimination of the poor, the sick, the "feebleminded". The Nazis got ahead of their time, and civilization recoiled. So eugenicists changed tactics. They championed positive eugenics-- "voluntary unconscious selection", "every child a wanted child"-- making the families of handicapped kids in the womb want to have their child culled, for his/her sake, for the sake of the family.

We are a eugenic society beyond the dreams of the Davenports and the Sangers and the Himmlers. Ninety percent of babies with Down's Syndrome never see a birthday, and fewer and fewer children with diagnosable serious birth defects escape the abortionists' curette. We are sorting pre-implantation embryos for genetic hygiene.

Now we are working on the other end of life-- culling the elderly sick, starving them, to be exact. But we don't call it that. The Pathway is designed not to offend, but to be effective in a quiet way. This will be the legacy of socialized medicine-- not access, but denial. Splicing medical care to a state-run economy makes illness a  fiducial matter for the government. End of life care, and care for chronically handicapped persons, will be one of the few things that governments will won't finance lavishly.

They're getting better and better at this stuff. At killing.

Evil learns.