Author: Jacqueline Laing

In October 2012, journalistic initiative elicited some horrific facts about what has come to be known in the UK as the Death Pathway (or Liverpool Care Pathway). Until then, many medical professionals had waxed lyrical about Britain’s sedation-dehydration regime. International conferences were run extolling the programme. Medical staff warmly congratulated one another on its use. It looked as though the Pathway was destined for global implementation. Although thousands of families had experienced enormous grief over its use, little attention was paid to them. Legal and medical professionals who warned that death cannot always be diagnosed with any certainty and that placing patients on the sedation-dehydration regimen could all too easily prove self-fulfilling were dismissed as crackpots. Indeed, I was among them. For years I had warned of the political, financial and medical interests that there are in institutionalising medical homicide whether by passive or active means.

The slippery slope argument is rightly regarded a logical fallacy, but a prediction based on sound reasoning is far from irrational. As if to prove the accuracy of predictions once widely dismissed as slippery slope fallacies, the Belgian Senate Committee has voted 13 to 4 in favour of allowing euthanasia for those with early dementia and for sick and disabled children. This means that the matter proceeds to the Belgian parliament for debate.

In my last post I made the following observation about professionals who agitate for the substantial lowering, if not outright abolition, of the age of consent.  

“To normalise the abnormal, there should be a ready supply of ‘useful idiots’. These are the journalists and quasi-intellectuals that can be relied on to give their blessing to the destruction of innocence perpetrated by decaying predators. That these ever-ready dim-wits exist should be obvious by the complicity of the press and broadcasting media that for decades suppressed complaints about the old pervert Jimmy Savile. Savile’s earthly span passed in a spirit of fearless predatory, necrophilic and paedophilic bliss. Those who challenged his revolting reign were ridiculed as, guess what, narrow-minded bigots. The alleged bigots  were, needless to say, swiftly silenced. Police were fobbed off. Journalists, entertainers and managers lauded his antics as progressive. Giggling alongside the old abuser were police officers, judges, adminstrators and a catalogue of professionals who would have been on notice about the complaints leveled against him.”

After certain press criticism and a productive online backlash in the blogosphere, the American Psychiatric Association is performing a gratifying volte-face in its use of the term sexual “orientation” for paedophilia. In its fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM V), the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has distinguished between paedophilic disorder and paedophilic orientation. Paedophilia-advocacy groups, like B4U-ACT, a grassroots lobby group, have long seen the declassification of paedophilia to the status of an “orientation” for “minor-attracted persons” (MAPs) to be a necessary means to their ends.[fn]See Dr Judith Reisman reporting on the August 17, 2011 B4UAct Conference. She highlights the plethora of paedophile justifications articulated by many speakers among which are such statements as “Assuming children are unable to consent lends itself to criminalization and stigmatization.”[/fn] The North American Man-Boy Love Association (and numerous international affiliates advocating sex between men and boys) see these and other developments as an important step towards their continuing objective of legalising and normalising paedophile activity. In response to the online critique, the APA has confirmed in the last few days that the DSM will be altered and that “it stands firmly behind efforts to criminally prosecute those who sexually abuse and exploit children and adolescents.”