Editorial in the New York Post, 10-16-98
PUTTING PEOPLE TO SLEEP
There is a saying that once you treat animals like
people, you are more likely to treat people like
animals. That seems as good a way as any to begin a
discussion of a local veterinarian's misguided
effort at
assisted suicide.
Some people are dismayed that Marco Zancope, the
vet in question, has been charged by the Manhattan
DA's office with second-degree manslaughter. After
all, it seems clear that the young victim, Cara
Beigel,
was a woman in agonizing pain from terminal
inflammatory breast cancer.
But there is a very good reason why assisted
suicides
like this are against the law: There could not be a
better example of a slippery slope that leads
inexorably to murder on a nightmarish scale.
The temptation to play God and deem someone else's
life not worth living is one that has proved
overwhelming - and corrupting - again and again. It
both predates and explains the ancient Hippocratic
Oath, which enjoins doctors from taking life.
Remember the Nazis' mercy killings of the mentally
and physically handicapped and how those horrors
were expanded to include millions said to have
no right
to live?
Once you allow even good, honest, sensible doctors -
the kind who cannot be influenced by the greedy
relatives of wealthy patients - to decide that a
human
life doesn't meet their criteria of quality, you put
uncounted human lives in terrible danger.
Of course, Zancope isn't even a physician; he's
a vet.
And that adds a more sinister cast to this whole
case.
After all, vets are hardened death-dealers: They put
animals to sleep all the time.
Even if putting an animal to sleep is called humane,
human life is rightly treated differently from
animal life,
by everyone except the animal rights extremists
(generally misanthropes who prefer animals to
people).
Of course, Zancope may just be a friend who
happened to have access to barbiturates in lethal
quantities. He may have acted from the best of
motives. But a society must hold human life sacred.
And that means no one, however well-intentioned, can
be allowed to do what he did without an expectation
of prosecution and imprisonment.
Copyright (c) 1998, N.Y.P. Holdings, Inc.
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