Imagine you are at work, going about your day. The phone rings. You pick up and it is a mortuary informing you they have your mother’s body.

“What do you mean you have my mother’s body!” you exclaim in utter shock.

“She was just euthanized today,” the voice on the other end mildly answers. “What should we do with the body?”

That is exactly what happened in 2012 to Belgian chemist Tom Mortier, who spoke (via Skype) yesterday at the very well attended East Coast Conference Against Assisted Suicide.  

A self-described secular humanist, he described his agony at the euthanasia killing of his depressed mother, Godelieva De Troyer, by an oncologist. His continuing pain was vivid in every word he spoke.

You might assume that since De Troyer was killed by an oncologist, she had terminal cancer. Wrong. She was a cancer patient but knew she was cancer free at the time of her death.

But she did have chronic depression. She was killed without any notice to her son. 

And here’s the kicker: What I didn’t know — and it made my jaw drop — was that Mortier’s mother willed her body to science, as a result of which, he was forced to deliver his mother for dissection and experimentation to the very hospital at which she had been killed.

Can you imagine? Yet, this horrible and heartless medicalized killing has made nary a ripple in the culture of death-besotted media. Compare that to the feeding frenzy over a young woman planning assisted suicide, with the media’s reporting crossing, in my view, into enthusiastic encouragement. 

I hope Mortier’s presentation at the conference is posted on YouTube or some other platform. His presentation — that went into much more detail than the video above — illustrates vividly how badly family members can be victimized by the coldness of assisted suicide and euthanasia. 

See also the Italian woman made dead at a Swiss suicide clinic because she was distraught at having lost her beauty. The first her family knew was when her ashes where shipped home. Very little coverage.

Mortier has filed a lawsuit against Belgian euthanasia in the European Court of Human Rights.

Cross-posted at Human Exceptionalism.