Why you should support SPUC’s White Flower Appeal this weekend
By Anthony Ozimic, SPUC:
The disabled, terminally-ill, incapacitated, and elderly are at grave risk. Help protect them by backing SPUC’s White Flower Appeal this weekend.
Our 2016 appeal, starting this weekend, will focus on our Lives Worth Living campaign against assisted suicide. In 1983 SPUC launched its first White Flower Appeal, an annual fundraising appeal held primarily in churches.
The symbol of the White Flower Appeal is a white rose. The inspiration for this choice of flower was the White Rose resistance group against Nazism by students at Munich University. These students were inspired to form the White Rose group after reading one of the famous sermons of Bishop (later Cardinal) Clemens von Galen against the Nazi euthanasia programme. Hans Scholl, one of the group’s leader, said: “Finally someone has the courage to speak.”
A White Flower
The white flower therefore links SPUC to a historic campaign of resistance to attacks against the right to life, including euthanasia. The whiteness of the rose symbolises innocent human life and the delicacy of a flower symbolises its vulnerability.
This week the continuing threat to innocent, vulnerable human life from euthanasia has been highlighted in the media. Yesterday The Times reported that:
“The Dutch Society for a Voluntary End of Life is now campaigning for suicide pills to become available automatically to everybody over 70 on the basis of a request to a doctor or pharmacist.
Doctors are concerned that medically assisted killing is increasingly seen as a consumer right and they fear that the campaign will create “an obligation for the doctor to co-operate” on demand, leading to abuse of euthanasia or an acceptance that it is the most appropriate social response to old age.
In 2014, 5,306 Dutch people, including 41 patients who were mentally ill, persuaded their doctors to administer lethal doses of drugs to end their lives because of “unbearable” pain. The figure was 10 per cent higher than the previous year.
If Britain had the same laws as the Netherlands and used euthanasia on the same per capita basis it would mean more than 20,200 people medically killed every year.”
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