LETTERS: SUICIDE ADVOCATES SHOULD BE AFRAID

To the editor:

But I say to you, my friends: Do not be afraid of those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more they can do. But I will show you whom you shall be afraid of. Be afraid of him whom after he has killed has power to cast into hell. Yes, I say to you, be afraid of him. -- Luke 12:4-6

Throughout the ages, suicide has alternately been considered a sin, a crime, a sickness or a social propriety. Now it is considered a basic human right for the ecumenical humanist, a signature of human freedom. Then there are the God-fearing among us who consider it to be a mortal sin because, by taking our own life, we not only deprive ourselves of life here on this earth, but also with him in the next world. Perhaps many of us cannot fathom heaven as a place. Some may imagine clouds and angels, something unreal. But I say to you if heaven is not an actual place, then where did Christ go after he ascended bodily into heaven? Perhaps some of us can't imagine what hell is like. After all, what is a river of fire? I think of a lava flow.

Way back in 1978, Doris Porterwood foresaw a time when suicide prevention centers would provide "the means for an efficient suicide." In 1984, Dr. Jerome Motto, a psychiatrist at the University of California, predicted that in the future there would be clinics established to facilitate suicide. Jacques Choron, who worked in suicide prevention through the National Institute of Mental Health, does not exclude giving the candidates the opportunity to avail themselves of the services of a suicide prevention center before making the final decision. And so now we see these suicide prevention centers joining abortion clinics as places where choice is a code word for killing.

Going back even further, 38 years ago the Rev. Joseph Fletcher, who is a pioneer of Planned Parenthood and the Euthanasia Society of America, proclaimed: "Death control, like birth control, is a matter of human dignity." Thirty years later, retired Michigan pathologist Dr. Jack Kevorkian, echoing Fletcher's usurpation of the divine prerogatives, asked: "We have birth control. Why not death control?" He dared: "If it is illegal, stop me. I have no fear of the law in this society. His lawyer absolutely gushes with pride: "Those who have not hope of a normal life need no longer be condemned to a hellish life." To those who favor a pro-death society, a hellish death is one of suffering like that of Christ on the cross. In their minds, a good death is euthanasia and suicide, the end of suffering. But is it?

I say to you that men and women who choose to play God should be prepared to meet the God who became man and warn, "Be afraid of him whom after he had killed has power to cast into hell. Yes, I say to you, be afraid of him."

CHRISTINE E. STEPHENS

Cape Girardeau