Worldwide, numbers of old people are increasinging faster than the general population — yet small families are considered normal. 

Young people are, relatively speaking, getting scarcer.

Who, in the future, will pay the taxes to keep the old alive and clean?

We need bigger families — otherwise governments won’t resist the temptation to liberalise euthanasia laws to cut down numbers of expensive-to-maintain old people.

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The Australian state of Tasmania is again under threat of having legal-euthanasia laws enacted.

Bizarrely, Tasmania’s Attorney-General, Lara Giddings, raised the issue of euthanasia in a Budget Reply speech on 22 June.

A “Dying with Dignity Bill”, introduced by Greens Party leader, Nick Mc­Kim, had been defeated in the Tasmanian Lower House only last November.

But the Greens now have a balance-of-power stranglehold on Tasmania.

They seem to have a stranglehold on Lara Giddings, anyway.

The Archbishop of Hobart is not impressed.

In a masterpiece of under-statement, he said, “As a society, we must be respectful of the sacred nature of human life — and having this mistaken sense of compassion certainly isn’t respectful of human dignity.”

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The Roman Catholic teaching on euthanasia is exactly what any compassionate, thinking person would conclude. Few of us, however, could express it so well:

Whatever its motives and means, direct euthanasia consists in putting an end to the lives of handicapped, sick, or dying persons. It is morally unacceptable.

Thus an act or omission which, of itself, or by intention, causes death in order to eliminate suffering constitutes a murder gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God, his Creator.  

The error of judgment into which one can fall in good faith does not change the nature of this murderous act, which must always be forbidden and excluded.

Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of ‘over-zealous’ treatment. Here one does not will to cause death; one’s inability to impede it is merely accepted . . . .(Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2277-2278)

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