Choosing To Die

ACROSS THE INTERNET came the story of a young man in Belgium who committed suicide, legally, with the assistance of a certified doctor. He had been a woman, but was one of these people, and there seem to be a few of them, who just knew that he was really a male, but born the wrong gender. So she had a sex change operation, and became a he. But the operation was botched, and the she was not really a he, but, apparently, something altogether different. The death wish came as a result of "extreme emotional distress", and was approved by the Belgian government.A sex change operation, whether from female to male or male to female, is fairly routine, and you don't hear about them being bungled in America, where they are quite common. In Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, assisted suicide has been perfectly legal for about a decade, the only places in the world where it is. Those progressive western european countries, ahead of the curve, like usual. Every year, the number of people choosing suicide in those three countries, by lethal injection, increases. At the present rate, everyone in those countries will be dead within a few years, so we can hope that the trend reverses. So it begis to appear that in the grand scheme of suffering that is life, there is a large number of us who would willingly end this life if able to do so with painless, comfortable assistance.Now we know. Perhaps the assisted sicide freedom law will spreaed across the world, and bring about an entirely unanticipated solution to the over population problem. If ther are thousands, and in fact there are, of people who want to die every year in such nice places as Belgium and Holland, it numbers most likely would be evern greater in many other less prosperous parts of the world, where suffering seems compounded.