'Euthanasia Blues'

Updated (by Tim):

NANAIMO, British Columbia, October 11, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A blunt, compelling music video on YouTube produced by a Canadian disability rights advocate warns of the threat euthanasia poses to the aged, the ill and people living with disabilities. "Euthanasia Blues" is a seven-minute sequence of images with sung and illustrated original lyrics with a message about the inevitable deadly consequences of legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Mwj8TUrbWg)

"You might think that how you die/Should be your own choice/But if euthanasia becomes legal/Disabled people will lose their voice," warns Norman Kunc, an educational consultant, family therapist and father of two, from Nanaimo, B.C.

Together with his wife Emma Van der Klif, Kunc travels extensively throughout North America and, more recently, worldwide speaking on the needs of the disabled community. In recent years much of his work has focused on the growing threat posed by efforts to legalize euthanasia.

"Seems we got a double standard/For the disabled, old, and ill/What you call the right to die/We call the obligation to be killed."

Kunc was born with cerebral palsy, a condition caused by brain injury in the unborn or newborn child that produces varying degrees of physical and/or cognitive disability. Doctors recommended that he be institutionalized at birth, advice which his parents ignored.

Disabled groups have been among the most vocal opponents of euthanasia and assisted suicide, despite the attempts by euthanasia advocates to present the movement as a compassionate reaction to the suffering of the physically disabled community. Not Dead Yet, a disability rights organization opposed to physician-assisted suicides and euthanasia, states on their website:

"Though often described as compassionate, legalized medical killing is really about a deadly double standard for people with severe disabilities...This is not compassion, it's contempt." (See: http://www.notdeadyet.org/docs/about.html )

In a fact sheet on euthanasia and physician assisted suicide posted on his website, Kunc points out that "compassion" as a justification for euthanasia would let parents who kill their children off the hook. Statistics show that about two-thirds of all murdered children, primarily not disabled, are killed by their parents. The violence is frequently justified by the guilty parents as an act of compassion, often as an attempt to shield the children from suffering emotional trauma.
He also states that children with disabilities are at least twice as likely to suffer violence than other children. Further, research suggests that violence against children causes more childhood disability than genetic causes or auto accidents, although in most cases the cause goes undiscovered. (See: http://www.normemma.com/euthfacts.htm) Adults with disabilities are at least three times as likely to be victims of violence.

See video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Mwj8TUrbWg

Visit Norman Kunc's website:
http://www.normemma.com/index.htm

See related LifeSiteNews coverage:

Disability Activists Call for Moratorium on Starvation and Dehydration
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005/feb/05021704.html

Activist Groups for Disabled Protest California Assisted-Suicide Bill
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2006/feb/06021305.html

Source: LifeSiteNews