Following a national referendum last year, the tiny former Yugoslavian republic of Slovenia has taken the first giant step on the road to euthanasia by legalizing medical suicide for the terminally ill. Unlike in Canada, notes Jonathon Van Maren in The European Conservative, Slovenia’s new law is highly restrictive, protecting anyone who actually wants to live, as well as the mentally ill – at least for now.
Blueprint for Alberta?
Writing in Jewish World Review, Frederic Fransen reminds Americans of a key lesson from Revolutionary War-era pamphleteer Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. “The colonies need to declare independence,” Fransen summarizes Paine, “because so long as their goal was seen as reconciliation, foreign governments would consider the Americans as rebels and the conflict an internal affair.” But a unilateral declaration of independence, Fransen notes, instantly converts mere complaints from an aggrieved group into a negotiation between sovereign states.
