"Florian Willet, a euthanasia advocate who was detained by Swiss authorities last year after being present when an American woman ended her life using a chamber-like device, has died."

"Mr. Willet’s death was reported in an obituary posted on the website of The Last Resort, his assisted dying group, written by Philip Nitschke, the inventor of the device, known as a Sarco capsule. Mr. Nitschke said in an email that Mr. Willet had died by assisted suicide, but further details about his death remained unclear.... Mr. Willet, who was 47, according to the obituary, was the only person with the American woman when she died using the Sarco device in a remote forest in Switzerland in September... Mr. Willet was released from pretrial detention in December, after which 'he was a changed man,' Mr. Nitschke wrote. 'Gone was his warm smile and self-confidence. In its place was a man who was deeply traumatized by the experience of incarceration and the wrongful accusation of strangulation.'..."

From "Euthanasia Advocate Who Assisted in Woman’s Suicide Dies in Germany/Dr. Florian Willet had been under investigation in Switzerland after being present when an American woman died using a so-called suicide pod" (NYT).

"Central to the questions around the woman’s death is the use of the Sarco capsule. The device, which can be transported to a location of a user’s choosing, is an airtight pod with a window. Inside is a button that initiates the process of replacing life-giving oxygen with nitrogen, killing the person inside within minutes.... 'In the final months of his life, Dr. Florian Willet shouldered more than any man should,' Mr. Nitschke wrote. 'He knew that he did nothing illegal or wrong, but his belief in the rule of law in Switzerland was in tatters.'"

Stay and fight, if you believe in your cause. And yet, what if the cause is the power to push the button on the escape pod when troubles abound? 

"Ms. Mekel, 82, has Alzheimer’s disease.... In the not-so-distant future, it will no longer be safe for her to stay at home alone...."

"She does not feel she can live with her children, who are busy with careers and children of their own. She is determined that she will never move to a nursing home, which she considers an intolerable loss of dignity. As a Dutch citizen, she is entitled by law to request that a doctor help her end her life when she reaches a point of unbearable suffering. And so she has applied for a medically assisted death.... Dr. Bert Keizer is alert for a very particular moment: It is known as 'five to 12' — five minutes to midnight... the last moment before a person loses that capacity to clearly state a rational wish to die. He will fulfill Ms. Mekel’s request to end her life only while she still is fully aware of what she is asking. They must act before dementia has tricked her, as it has so many of his other patients, into thinking her mind is just fine.... Whose assessment should carry more weight, she asks: current Irene Mekel, who sees loss of autonomy as unbearable, or future Irene, with advanced dementia, who is no longer unhappy, or can no longer convey that she’s unhappy, if someone must feed and dress her."

From "She’s Trying to Stay Ahead of Alzheimer’s, in a Race to the Death/In the Netherlands, doctors and dementia patients must negotiate a fine line: Assisted death for those without capacity is legal, but doctors won’t do it" (NYT).

We hear about another woman who had "dreaded the nursing home, but once she got there, she had some good years.... She was a voracious reader and devoured a book from the residence library each day. She had loved sunbathing all her life, and the staff made sure she could sit in the sun and read for hours."

Understand the problem: Mekel has to go early.

"She complained that her arranged death, which would have been the first one in the Sarco pod, had become a 'media circus.'"

"McLaughlin also said that the group had pushed her to spend her money, telling her she 'won't need it after I die.' She said: 'I felt manipulated and exploited. If I had known that the deeply heartless people who held my fate in their hands were mainly driven by their own media presence and marketing, I would never have subjected myself to this ordeal.'"

From "Makers of Sarco suicide pod 'pushed another woman to spend money before she died'" (Daily Mail).

"It may very well be that 10 years from now people will pay $10,000 in cash to be castrated just in order to be affected by something."

Says Andre Gregory in "My Dinner With Andre" — page 59 of the screenplay — a 1981 movie. 

It's not 10 years later. It's more than 40 years later. But think of the things we're doing now just in order to be affected by something.

For example, there's Zoraya ter Beek, 28, who "expects to be euthanized in early May" (The Free Press):

She said she was hobbled by her depression and autism and borderline personality disorder. Now she was tired of living—despite, she said, being in love with her boyfriend, a 40-year-old IT programmer, and living in a nice house with their two cats.

"Although still rare, euthanasia of couples was first noted in a review of all cases in 2020..."

"... when 26 people were granted euthanasia at the same time as their partners. The numbers grew to 32 the following year and 58 in 2022.... Elke Swart, spokesperson for the Expertisecentrum Euthanasie, which grants the euthanasia wish of about 1,000 people a year in the Netherlands, said any couple’s requests for assisted death were tested against strict requirements individually rather than together. 'Interest in this is growing, but it is still rare,' she said. 'It is pure chance that two people are suffering unbearably with no prospect of relief at the same time … and that they both wish for euthanasia.'"

From "Duo euthanasia: former Dutch prime minister dies hand in hand with his wife/Dries and Eugenie van Agt, both 93, died as number of couples in Netherlands choosing joint end to life grows" (The Guardian).

1. "Although still rare...." implies that we know where we're going and it will ultimately be routine.

2. It's a commitment beyond the marriage vow "'Til death do us part." Even death will not part them.

3. Makes me think of that Death Cab for Cutie song — "Love of mine, some day you will die/But I'll be close behind, I'll follow you into the dark..."

4. The claim is that the 2 who apply to depart together are evaluated independently, and their wish to journey together counts for nothing. Should it? A reason to say no is that it's hard to tell which way it should count. There could be too much charity or elevation of the other's interests over one's own. But perhaps that is part of self-definition. If you're allowing euthanasia — you've already gone this far — why deprive the individual of the spiritual aspect of the decision. 

"The idea that human rights encompass a right to self-destruction, the conceit that people in a state of terrible suffering and vulnerability are really 'free'..."

"... to make a choice that ends all choices, the idea that a healing profession should include death in its battery of treatments — these are inherently destructive ideas. Left unchecked, they will forge a cruel brave new world, a dehumanizing final chapter for the liberal story."

Writes Ross Douthat in "What Euthanasia Has Done to Canada" (NYT). 

I'll put the next sentence after the jump because it's a surprising change in topic (but I bet you can predict it if you know how these things go these days):

"If the government sponsored a euthanasia program for people 75 and over, would you consent to it?"

"'Most people were very positive about it,' [Chie] Hayakawa said. 'They didn’t want to be a burden on other people or their children.'... In her first feature-length film... the government of a near-future Japan promotes quiet institutionalized deaths and group burials for lonely older people, with cheerful salespeople pitching them on the idea as if hawking travel insurance. 'The mind-set is that if the government tells you to do something, you must do it,' Ms. Hayakawa, 45, said in an interview in Tokyo before the film’s opening in Japan on Friday. Following the rules and not imposing on others, she said, are cultural imperatives 'that make sure you don’t stick out in a group setting.' With a lyrical, understated touch, Ms. Hayakawa has taken on one of the biggest elephants in the room in Japan: the challenges of dealing with the world’s oldest society."

From "A Filmmaker Imagines a Japan Where the Elderly Volunteer to Die/The premise for Chie Hayakawa’s film, 'Plan 75,' is shocking: a government push to euthanize the elderly. In a rapidly aging society, some also wonder: Is the movie prescient?" (NYT).

The authorities have decided that Martha Sepúlveda — that Colombian woman who was planning to get euthanized today — must live.

WaPo reports: 

[A] medical committee determined that she no longer met the conditions because her health had apparently improved.... She had no idea health officials were even meeting to review her case. She had been quietly living out her final hours, and had tuned out media coverage of her case. 

“She canceled her phone plan because she thought she was going to die tomorrow,” her lawyer, Camila Jaramillo, said on Saturday night. Jaramillo’s law firm, the Laboratory of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (DescLAB), has vowed to fight the decision, which it described as “illegitimate and arbitrary,” and one that violated her right to a “dignified death.”...

Here's my post from 2 days ago, based on WaPo's story about the planned event. The authorities say their new decision is based on the "high probability" that her disease — ALS — wouldn't kill her within 6 months, but it's very hard not to suspect that the news reports — especially the big WaPo article — caused the authorities to retreat from strong support for euthanasia. It's not just that the public was put in a position to express disapproval. It's also that she participated in publicity, providing evidence that the committee relied on:

Sepúlveda appeared on television smiling and laughing as she dined at a local restaurant this month.... 

ADDED: The authorities seem to have unwittingly inflicted something like the torture of a mock execution. Not exactly like, of course, unless there have been some victims of mock execution who, preparing to die, genuinely wanted to die.

"On Sunday, Sepúlveda, who considers herself a devout Catholic, plans to become the first person in Colombia without a terminal prognosis to die by legally authorized euthanasia."

"Colombia’s constitutional court ruled in July that the right to euthanasia.... applies... to those with 'intense physical or mental suffering from bodily injury or serious and incurable disease.'... An estimated 73 percent of the population is Catholic.... Eduardo Díaz Amado, director of the Bioethics Institute at Pontifical Xavierian University in Bogotá, traces the development to the country’s long civil war and the violence wrought by drug lord Pablo Escobar. In 1991, in response to the country’s instability, Colombia rewrote its constitution. Unlike its 'paternalistic' predecessor, Díaz said, the new constitution expanded individual rights, emphasized 'the respect of human dignity' and underscored the separation of church and state.... In 2014, the court ordered the government to issue guidelines so that hospitals, insurers and health professionals would know how to proceed with euthanasia requests. The movement for euthanasia rights has drawn unexpected allies: Catholic priests. Alberto Múnera, a theology professor and Jesuit priest at the Pontifical Xavierian University in Bogotá, lectures his students on the 'exceptions' to the 'absolute value of human life' in church teaching. When Catholics follow their own consciences, even when that means choosing to end their own lives, he argues, they will 'behave well' in the eyes of God...."

From "She’s 51, a mother and a devout Catholic. She plans to die by euthanasia on Sunday" (WaPo).

"Some farmers are injecting pregnant sows to cause abortions. Others are forced to euthanize their animals..."

"... often by gassing or shooting them. It’s gotten bad enough that Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has asked the Trump administration to provide mental health resources to hog farmers. Despite this grisly reality — and the widely reported effects of the factory-farm industry on America’s lands, communities, animals and human health long before this pandemic hit — only around half of Americans say they are trying to reduce their meat consumption. Meat is embedded in our culture and personal histories in ways that matter too much, from the Thanksgiving turkey to the ballpark hot dog. Meat comes with uniquely wonderful smells and tastes, with satisfactions that can almost feel like home itself. And what, if not the feeling of home, is essential? And yet, an increasing number of people sense the inevitability of impending change....  One of the unexpected side effects of these months of sheltering in place is that it’s hard not to think about the things that are essential to who we are.... We cannot protect against pandemics while continuing to eat meat regularly. Much attention has been paid to wet markets, but factory farms, specifically poultry farms, are a more important breeding ground for pandemics. Further, the C.D.C. reports that three out of four new or emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic — the result of our broken relationship with animals.... As in a dream where our homes have rooms unknown to our waking selves, we can sense there is a better way of eating, a life closer to our values."

Writes the acclaimed novelist Jonathan Safran Foer in "The End of Meat Is Here/If you care about the working poor, about racial justice, and about climate change, you have to stop eating animals" (NYT). He also does non-fiction with "Eating Animals" (2009) and "We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast" (2019). From his Wikipedia article:

Foer was a "flamboyant" and sensitive child who, at the age of 8, was injured in a classroom chemical accident that resulted in "something like a nervous breakdown drawn out over about three years," during which "he wanted nothing, except to be outside his own skin."... He has been an occasional vegetarian since the age of 10... In his childhood, teen, and college years, he called himself vegetarian but still often ate meat....

I thought that meat-as-home image was interesting. Meat almost feels like home, but you know those dreams where you find other rooms in your house? In your home that smells of meat, there's another room, and it has no meat in it, you've seen it in your dreams, and you can find it in real life. Or something. It's a bit cornball, and the references to "home" are at the beginning and the end — much farther apart in the actual article that in my snippet above — so it would be easy to miss.

Something else that caught my eye: At one point, he says: "These are not my or anyone’s opinions, despite a tendency to publish this information in opinion sections. And the answers to the most common responses raised by any serious questioning of animal agriculture aren’t opinions." There's something dictatorial in that: This isn't opinion, this is truth. Ironically, that makes him sound more opinionated. It yells: I am a polemicist, an ideologue.

I can appreciate a good polemic, and Foer seems to be striving to be a first-rate polemicist. I suspect that his great success as a novelist makes him think that if he does polemics he'll trounce the other writers. This didn't work on me, though. Who exactly is supposed to be horrified by pigs getting abortions and euthanasia? People who support abortions and euthanasia for human beings? People who accept that pigs are raised for slaughter, want to eat meat, but are morally opposed to abortions and euthanasia for human beings? If it's just people who feel sorry for the farmers who won't make the money they'd planned to make from their hogs because of the pandemic, that has nothing to do with the inevitability of an impending transition to vegetarianism.

AND: Senator Grassley has been advocating for mental health resources for farmers since long before the current pandemic. See "Grassley Signs Onto Bipartisan Ernst Legislation to Provide Mental Health Support to Agricultural Communities" (press release from Grassley, May 24, 2018)("("[O]ur farmers and agricultural workers experience disproportionately high levels of suicide... 'We must do more to ensure those who work tirelessly from sunrise to sundown to feed and fuel our world have access to the mental health resources and supports they need'")).

"It is legal for someone as young as 12 to request and receive euthanasia, as long as the parents give their permission, according to Dutch law."

"For those 16 to 18, parents must be aware of the request but their permission is not necessary....  [Steven] Pleiter, the director of the end-of-life clinic in The Hague, said that gaining approval for euthanasia was a complex process. After the clinic receives a request, he said, it is reviewed, with doctors and nurses making home visits and conducting multiple interviews. Every person seeking euthanasia must meet criteria set by Dutch law, which include ensuring that the request is voluntary, that the person is in unbearable suffering with a poor prognosis that shows no improvement, and that he or she is mentally able to understand the process and its consequences.... The clinic received 2,600 euthanasia requests in 2018 — 27 percent to 28 percent of them were from mentally ill patients, according to Mr. Pleiter. Of the 727 patients who were euthanized last year, about 50 were patients with mental health problems, he said."

From "Dutch Teenager’s Death Sets Off Debate, and Media Corrections" (NYT). The teenager, Noa Pothoven, was not, contrary to news reports, given this Dutch euthanasia. She asked for it but was denied for reasons that are not disclosed. She died, we're now told, by her own action of ceasing to eat or drink. It sounds as though she was with her family and under medical care when she died but no lethal injection was delivered by a doctor. Her mother is quoted as having said, before the death, "Noa doesn’t want this life anymore. She just longs for peace."

ADDED: A few important details from the BBC report:

1. The "friends and family want people to know that she did not die of euthanasia" and want their privacy respected. I presume they are not happy about the criticism they received after the way the story was originally told.

2. After Noa Pothoven stopped eating, she was force fed through a tube for a while, but "[e]ventually her family accepted her wish to die, so they stopped forcing her to stay alive and instead used palliative care to make her final days as peaceful and bearable as possible." There seems to have been "palliative sedation... to alleviate suffering" as she died. This is easy to confuse with euthanasia, but it's not the same as the euthanasia procedure described above.

3. The girl's own refusal to eat is considered the cause of death. The use "palliative drugs" to ease a path to death when force-feeding is still a way back to life could be characterized as euthanasia, but it's not that official process defined in Dutch law. The Royal Dutch Medical Association is anxious to communicate this distinction: "Under Dutch law, euthanasia is defined as the active termination of life, by a physician, at a patients voluntary and well informed request... on persons who suffer unbearably from a medical condition." Accepting that a person is committing suicide and not actively intervening to save her is not euthanasia as defined in Dutch law, even if drugs are given to ease the pain.

4. The parents blame the Dutch authorities for making her wait "more than a year" to get treatment for her eating disorder. When she finally got treatment, it was intense — including an induced coma with tube feeding. The BBC article does not go into the difference that might have been made if she had received treatment for anorexia much earlier or the psychological effect of forcing a tube into a person who was traumatized by rape.

"Noa Pothoven, 17, has been legally euthanized in the Netherlands, saying the pain she was dealing with after a childhood rape was 'insufferable.'"

"The teen wrote an autobiography called 'Winning or Learning,' which details her battles with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anorexia after being molested and raped as a young child.... Pothoven asked her friends and followers on Instagram to 'not convince me that this is not good, this is my decision and it is final.' Children as young as 12 can opt for euthanasia in the Netherlands, but only after a doctor determines that the patient’s pain is unbearable" NY Post.

Unbearable.

"When Keizer and the nurse who was to assist him arrived, they found around 35 people gathered around the dying man’s bed."

"'They were drinking and guffawing and crying,' Keizer told me when I met him in Amsterdam recently. 'It was boisterous. And I thought: "How am I going to cleave the waters?" But the man knew exactly what to do. Suddenly he said, "OK, guys!" and everyone understood. Everyone fell silent. The very small children were taken out of the room and I gave him his injection. I could have kissed him, because I wouldn’t have known how to break up the party.' Keizer is one of around 60 physicians on the books of the Levenseindekliniek, or End of Life Clinic, which matches doctors willing to perform euthanasia with patients seeking an end to their lives, and which was responsible for the euthanasia of some 750 people in 2017. For Keizer, who was a philosopher before studying medicine, the advent of widespread access to euthanasia represents a new era. 'For the first time in history,' he told me, 'we have developed a space where people move towards death while we are touching them and they are in our midst. That’s completely different from killing yourself when your wife’s out shopping and the kids are at school and you hang yourself in the library – which is the most horrible way of doing it, because the wound never heals. The fact that you are a person means that you are linked to other people. And we have found a bearable way of severing that link, not by a natural death, but by a self-willed ending. It’s a very special thing.'"

From "Death on demand: has euthanasia gone too far?/Countries around the world are making it easier to choose the time and manner of your death. But doctors in the world’s euthanasia capital are starting to worry about the consequences" (The Guardian).

"Today, in the internet age, anyone can be a Nigerian prince. In Mr. Abel’s time, however, the hoaxer’s art — involving intricate planning..."

"... hiring actors, donning disguises, printing official-looking letterheads, staging news conferences and having the media swallow the story hook, line and sinker — entailed, for better or worse, a level of old-time craftsmanship whose like will almost certainly not be seen again.... Mr. Abel’s first major hoax, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, or SINA — which sought 'to clothe all naked animals that appear in public, namely horses, cows, dogs and cats, including any animal that stands higher than 4 inches or is longer than 6 inches' — began in 1959.... Over the next few years, the organization’s activities (including a 1963 picket of the White House by Mr. Abel, who demanded that the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, clothe her horses) were faithfully reported by news organizations, among them The Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and CBS News.... Then there was Omar’s School for Beggars, a New York City institution founded amid the recession of the 1970s, which claimed to teach the nouveau poor the gentle art of panhandling.... the subject of credulous coverage by many news outlets, including The Miami Herald and New York magazine.... There were also the Topless String Quartet, with which, Mr. Abel said, an unsuspecting Frank Sinatra wanted to book a recording session; the Ku Klux Klan Symphony Orchestra, which, he said, the failed presidential candidate and former Klan grand wizard David Duke briefly accepted an invitation to conduct; Females for Felons, a group of Junior Leaguers who selflessly donated sex to the incarcerated; the mass 'fainting' of audience members during a live broadcast of 'The Phil Donahue Show'; his 'discovery' (he posed as a former White House employee) of the missing 18½ minutes from the Watergate tapes; Euthanasia Cruises ('For people who wanted to expire in luxury,' Mr. Abel’s website recounted); Citizens Against Breastfeeding....  To some observers, Mr. Abel’s antics were a Rabelaisian delight. To others, especially members of the news media who had been taken in, they were an unalloyed menace."

From "Alan Abel, Hoaxer Extraordinaire, Is (on Good Authority) Dead at 94" (NYT).

"Nic and Trees Elderhorst, both 91, died [together, by euthanasia] in their hometown of Didam, in the Netherlands, after 65 years of marriage."

"The couple both suffered from deteriorating physical health over the past five years..."

...with Mr Elderhorst left with reduced mobility after a stroke in 2012.  Walking had also become increasingly difficult for his wife, who had also suffered from memory loss.

“It soon became clear that it could not wait much longer,” the couple’s daughter told The Gelderlande. “The geriatrician determined that our mother was still mentally competent. However, if our father were to die, she could become completely disoriented, ending up in a nursing home. Something which she desperately did not want. Dying together was their deepest wish.”

We're told it's rare for 2 persons to go together, given that each must meet the standard.

The morning after: Why did I do that last night — not blog about Neil Gorsuch?

I'm asking myself that question in the cold dark of pre-dawn. All I wrote last night was "UPDATE: Gorsuch." Not even an exclamation point after "Gorsuch."

But this is good. Talk about normalizing Trump! Trump named someone on his pre-vetted list, just as he said he would do. The man, by all observable indicia, appears perfectly appropriate, including the humble demeanor.*

Trump looked and sounded very presidential in the classic East Room setting. Those who want immediately to trash anything Trump does were invited to look like fools.

I was watching CNN, and the first (and only) attacks I heard were about Gorsuch's opposition to assisted suicide. I laughed. The Trump antagonists are going to rage about the value of suicide?!

We're supposed to get outraged because Gorsuch is against suicide? The Trump-haters think they can rally us with our enthusiasm for suicide?! Maybe they think they can. After all, younger folks may hanker for euthanizing us baby boomers, and arguments about suicide resemble arguments about abortion. Knock yourself out, Gorsuch opponents, you crazy nuts.
_____________________________

* If I had live-blogged my every thought last night, I would have dinged him for wearing a plaid tie and wiping his nose a few times and turning the pages of his written speech with undue amplitude. I'd have complained about his incantation of all the usual pieties,** but that wasn't enough to get me up out of my comfy TV-watching chair last night. Perhaps Trump planned it that way. Make it a prime-time TV show and people will be deactivated in their comfy chairs. They'll watch and feel that Gorsuch is a very fine man. Look at his education credentials. Clerked for Whizzer White and Anthony Kennedy. And doesn't his wife look like my high school teacher in that white blouse and a-line skirt? Zzzzz.
_____________________________

** "'Pieties' — is that not a word?" I ask the room as Blogger impugns it as a typo. Before looking it up and ensuring that it is indeed a word — it is — I'm distracted by its silliness — "pie ties," just as I'm writing about the man's tie. I'm contemplating the American slapstick/protest history of pies in the face of dignified tie-wearing men....





... it's so perfectly the opposite of pieties. But the dignified men of the present are well-defended nowadays, and I haven't seen a classic pie-in-the-face protest in a long time. The one in those 2 pictures is a mayor deliberately taking a pie-in-the-face challenge.***

_____________________________

*** The answer to the old question Can a footnote have a footnote? is: Yes!

"'All she could do all day was clean. It was impossible for her to maintain a relationship. Her whole development had stalled.' The patient wanted to die in the evening..."

"... at 11 minutes past eight, in her own home. (She chose the very precise time for reasons she kept to herself.) She had already prepared the invitation cards for her memorial and had bought champagne for the four women who would watch her death. The quartet were psychiatrist Ms Casteelen who would kill her, an assisting nurse from the End Of Life clinic, the patient's GP and a close friend. Ms Casteelen recalls that the patient was wearing grey pyjamas and says she was happy and relaxed. 'At eight o'clock, I said: 'We have to start preparing things now. She replied: 'No. I would like another glass of champagne.' We asked her if she still wanted to die. She told us how she had been looking forward to this moment; how she was going to be free.'"

From "The woman killed by doctors because she was obsessed with cleaning: Just one of growing numbers of Dutch people given the right to euthanasia because of mental, not terminal, illness" in The Daily Mail. The highest-rated comments over there approve of what the Dutch are doing: "The Dutch are a thoughtful and civilised people who recognise that we all have the right to die if that is what we wish." "It was HER life. Her decision. And sometimes mental illness IS terminal. Why don't people but [sic] out of other people's lives?" "Whats wrong with that? At least she's going to a clinic rather than throwing herself off a bridge onto a busy road! I have always said if you want to kill yourself (suicide) then fine, go ahead, just don't take others with you as that is selfish! Those who are in that dark place, fair enough, but why should train drivers or car drivers etc have to suffer too?"

ADDED: Key phrase: "No. I would like another glass of champagne." Does "no" mean "no" when you've gathered 3 medical personnel to perform a specific procedure at a precise time? Interesting that someone who supposedly obsessed about cleaning put champagne ahead of precision at the last moment. How do you call it off once such an occasion has been made of it? And yet, without the occasion, there would have been no cause for champagne.

"On the eve of Pope Francis’s arrival in the U.S., the Vatican has taken offense at the Obama administration’s decision to invite to the pope’s welcome ceremony..."

"... transgender activists, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop and an activist nun who leads a group criticized by the Vatican for its silence on abortion and euthanasia."

According to a senior Vatican official, the Holy See worries that any photos of the pope with these guests at the White House welcoming ceremony next Wednesday could be interpreted as an endorsement of their activities.

There are 15,000 invited guests so how could any sane person make an interpretation of endorsement?

Where doctors perform euthanasia even on non-terminal patients and pronounce it "very magical."

From a New Yorker article titled "The Death Treatment/When should people with a non-terminal illness be helped to die?"

In Belgium, euthanasia is embraced as an emblem of enlightenment and progress, a sign that the country has extricated itself from its Catholic, patriarchal roots....

[P]eople have... been euthanized because they had autism, anorexia, borderline personality disorder, chronic-fatigue syndrome, partial paralysis, blindness coupled with deafness, and manic depression. In 2013, Wim Distelmans euthanized a forty-four-year-old transgender man, Nathan Verhelst, because Verhelst was devastated by the failure of his sex-change surgeries; he said that he felt like a monster when he looked in the mirror. “Farewell, everybody,” Verhelst said from his hospital bed, seconds before receiving a lethal injection.

The laws seem to have created a new conception of suicide as a medical treatment, stripped of its tragic dimensions. Patrick Wyffels, a Belgian family doctor, told me that the process of performing euthanasia, which he does eight to ten times a year, is “very magical.”...

ADDED: Speaking of "sex-change" surgeries... one might say that someone who wants suicide is seeking to have his or her body transformed to correspond to the identity that exists in the mind, that of a dead person.

"Euthanasia Coaster is a hypothetical euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely—with elegance and euphoria—take the life of a human being."

(Euthanasia Coaster from Julijonas Urbonas.)

"... either for dealing with overpopulation or if your life becomes... too long."