In Today's Appleton Post Crescent:

This letter appears in the Monday April 4, 2005 Post Crescent (letters section).

Civilized culture would allow painless exit

I’m both amazed and saddened that amidst all the rhetoric and political grandstanding surrounding Terri Schiavo that few, if any, want to address the larger issue; that as Americans, our culture affords more dignity in death to pets and convicted criminals than toward our loved ones.

See where this is headed? He is trying to lower the human to the animal the innocent to the heinously criminal. National Review's Wesley J. Smith reports on an interesting remark from Peter Singer the leader in the movement to animalize humanity.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times published an apologia for infanticide by Princeton's notorious Peter Singer, which its subheadline described as "an ethics expert," in which the world's most famous proponent of infanticide - he once explicitly compared the killing of a baby to the catching of a mackerel - attempts to conflate removing intensive care and other life support from a dying baby with active killing based on quality of life considerations: "The dispute is no longer about whether it is justifiable to end an infant's life if it won't be worth living," Singer wrote, "but whether that end may be brought about by active means...."

Wesley J. Smith, National Review Online March 22, 2005

Mr. Froemming continues:

Specifically, many of us who own and love pets cannot bear watching them pass on in pain or paralysis, so we “put them down” and justify it as euthanasia. Our conscience is clean. Many criminals sentenced to death are given a simple injection, and they slip away painlessly. After all, we’re not barbarians, right?

But when it comes to our loved ones, we either send them away to nursing homes or keep them barely alive with our medical technology. This, of course, is “civilized.” And we put people like Jack Kevorkian in jail. Doesn’t anyone else see the irony here? I can only hope that if one day I end up paralyzed, unconscious and soiling myself, that my wife will have the courage to honor my request and let me go — but not by dehydration and starvation. Hopefully, she’ll have the courage to honor my request for a painless exit from an otherwise grim situation.

If we were truly a “civilized” culture, we would find a way to embrace and legalize a better way to honor the wishes of the dying.

Richard Froemming,

Neenah

So, many people will put their animals down when they break a leg or similarly minor injury or contract a disease which may be curable but expensive to cure. Does Mr. Froemming suggest we start putting down people in similar circumstances? He suggests exactly that.

Perhaps Mr. Froemming, when you start forgetting where your car-keys are your children and wife will put you on an iceberg and let you sit there on your own. Shame on you!