No Such Thing as a Good Death

From Politics & Evangelical Theology :

"The very word, “euthanasia,” indicates that it is an anti-Christian idea at its very core. It comes from two Greek words meaning “good death.” If ever there were an oxymoron from the standpoint of a Christian worldview, this one surely qualifies. Christianity is an irrevocably life-affirming worldview. Death is not the design. Death is not, never has been, and never will be something good. The Apostle Paul teaches that death is fundamentally anti-creational, the very thing that God is overcoming in his work of redemption: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26).

Euthanasia may not seem as controversial as, say, abortion and infanticide, because it brings to mind the relief of suffering. The euthanasia movement self-consciously tailors its language to invoke a noble concept: death with dignity. But the movement is much more than simply relieving pain and suffering as a person dies. Euthanasia is not fundamentally about palliative care. As a movement, it is purely a creature of modern progressivism. Ian Dowbiggin writes:

Before World War I the overwhelming consensus among Americans was that physicians were justified in trying to provide their dying patients with a [sic] ‘easy death’ by making them as comfortable and pain-free as possible, but there was almost no public support for legalizing active mercy killing. Only when the popularity of social Darwinism, scientific naturalism, eugenics, positivism, and the ideology of Progressivism mounted at the beginning of the twentieth century, undermining faith in traditional religious beliefs, did a debate begin over whether or not the state should permit painless killing of incurable patients."