Devotion to self-determination leads to euthanizing children

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

The first minor to receive permission from Belgium to be put to death by euthanasia died last weekend. The teen was 17 years old.

We don’t know who it was. We don’t know the circumstances. What we do know comes from a Belgian politician who supports the country’s euthanasia law. That law, enacted two years ago, requires the consent of a parent or guardian, and the child is supposed to “understand what euthanasia means.”

Not only is the acceptance of euthanasia bad medicine, contradicting thousands of years of doctors’ promises to “first do no harm,” but it also gives unprepared minors too much authority over their own lives, John Stonestreet said.

Western laws don’t allow minors to consent to sex with adults, nor can they face trial as adults for committing crimes, in most cases.

“There are some brain connections that aren’t quite made when you’re a teenager,” Stonestreet said. “Those have to do, for example, with risky behavior or being able to think down the road about the consequences for your actions.”

The case in Belgium illustrates how euthanasia laws can slide down a slippery slope.

They first allow only terminally ill patients to choose their deaths, then they expand to patients with permanent disabilities, and finally to people who are in unbearable pain.

“Some people can bear an awful lot of pain, and some people can’t,” Stonestreet said. “All of a sudden, we’re pretending that minors have the ability to decide what is unbearable suffering.”

Stonestreet said he feared how euthanasia laws would be applied in today’s Western parenting culture, which mistakenly teaches that parents should meet all their childrens' desires: “What if that creeps over into giving the kid whatever he wants, even if that includes a cocktail of lethal drugs?”

The law is crazy and dehumanizing, Stonestreet said.

“It’s the result of a culture that’s so thoroughly confused the meaning of life with self-determination that people who don’t feel like they have the ability to self-determine suddenly have lives that ‘aren’t worth living,’” he concluded. “It’s a tragic situation.”

Listen to “Culture Friday” on the Sept. 23, 2016, episode of The World and Everything in It.