Join host Priscilla Rahn as she explores one of the most pressing and controversial issues of our time: euthanasia and assisted suicide. In this deeply insightful episode, Dr. Mark Mostert joins the conversation, delving into the historical roots and the current sociopolitical landscape surrounding these practices. Understanding the crucial distinctions between assisted suicide and euthanasia, listeners are taken on a journey through the dark corridors of history, examining how the ‘survival of the fittest’ ideology has shaped modern thinking about life and death.
00:00:03 Introduction to Restoring Education in America
Welcome to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Rahn. She’s a master educator and author leading the conversation to restore the American mind through wisdom, virtue, and truth.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to Restoring Education in America. I’m your host, Priscilla Rahn, and I am so thrilled that you’ve decided to join the conversation today. You know, for a parent, there’s nothing more precious than their children. We’re going to talk about the importance of really caring for children. our young people and into adulthood, but there’s a new private classical school that’s opening just for your children. It’s called Excalibur Classical Academy. They’re opening in the Centennial Colorado area and their mission and vision is restoring America’s heritage by developing servant leaders who are keepers and defenders of the principles of freedom for which our founding fathers pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. So if you would like a tour or more information, please go to their website, ExcaliburClassicalAcademy.org. And by the way, they’re opening for students kindergarten through third grade. So please check them out. But again, back to… the love of human beings and, you know, parents really trusting the public education system. I want to bring my friend to the stage. He’s a special guest that’s going to talk about this important topic. Welcome, Dr. Mostert. Hello.
SPEAKER 04 :
Hello, Priscilla. How are you?
SPEAKER 01 :
I’m doing great, and thank you so much for taking the time to talk about a very critical issue. And before we get too far into the conversation, I’m going to share a little bit of your bio with our listeners. Dr. Mark Mostert is a senior researcher at Able Americans, the National Center’s project to support Americans living with intellectual, developmental, and physical disabilities. Mark received his undergraduate degree from the Johannesburg College of Education in South Africa, a master’s in special education from the University of South Alabama, and a Ph.D. in special education research from the University of Virginia. Mark has an extensive academic background as researcher, author and presenter both nationally and internationally. He was full professor of special education at Regent University while directing the doctoral program in special education. He also served as the director of the Institute for the Study of Disability and Bioethics and as web content director of the award-winning Useless Eaters website. Mark has served as a disability consultant to several member nations at the UN on topics related to disability policy and practices. He resides in Virginia Beach, where he pursues his lifelong love of opera and classical singing. Mark, I said this last time you were on my show, but we’re overdue. because that’s really my first love is music, but I won’t put you on the spot. Very, very nice. Lovely. So see, you’re like a Swiss army knife, Dr. Mostert. Oh, really?
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay, yeah. I hope I’m not that sharp, okay?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, listen, this is a really, really critical issue. The last time I had you on the radio show, you talked a little bit about what’s going on, but now we’re going to dig a little bit deeper into some of the research and the latest updates you have on euthanasia. So Dr. Mostert, you’ve studied some of the darkest chapters in human history, including the Nazi euthanasia programs. Why is it so important for Americans to understand this history today?
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, thanks so much for the opportunity, Priscilla. And this is a very pressing problem that is not often spoken about in the public. And one reason, as you’ve identified, is that it’s a very dark time. And these are dark things to talk about. No one’s making too many jokes. It’s very serious. And in many cases, it’s a life or a death issue. So when you think about assisted suicide and euthanasia, let me first explain the difference, because there is quite a big difference. Assisted suicide is when somebody wants to die, commit suicide, and people help them do it. And the way it usually works is the person will say, I want to die, I want to commit suicide, and someone will hand them the pills, for example, to kill themselves. That’s assisted suicide. You are assisting somebody to commit suicide. Euthanasia is when somebody actually kills you. Now, you might have asked to be killed. You might not have. But that’s the difference. Assisted suicide, someone helps you commit suicide. Euthanasia is when someone actually physically kills you and ends your life. So those are the two kind of distinctions we have to hold. Of course, assisted suicide and euthanasia have been around for thousands of years. It’s not exactly a new topic. But starting in the 1880s towards the 1900s, we started to see a very vile idea take hold. And that was this idea of survival of the fittest. And that was coined by a man called Charles Darwin, who in the field of biology is a giant. He did a lot of fantastically good things, and he applied the survival of the fittest only to the animal world or the physical world. So he said, you know, if you look at a herd of coyotes, the ones that survive are the ones that are strongest and not sick, and then they procreate and keep things stronger going forward, right? That was a fine idea, and it’s still used a lot in all kinds of ways in academia. But what some people decided was, was that survival of the fittest could apply to human beings. And that’s where the rot set in. Because once you take the idea of survival of the fittest, you are saying, we want generations of people here on out that are stronger, fitter, more healthy than what came before. Now, here’s the problem with that. Not everyone is going to be stronger and fitter and better than before. So what do you do with people who aren’t among the strongest individuals? and the strongest survivors of a species. So in the early 1920s, this was a very hot idea in the UK, in Europe, in the US. Everyone was on this idea, how do we make populations more perfect and less imperfect? And so people started to do quote unquote research. They come up with all kinds of ideas about how to do this. And eventually by the mid twenties, people were saying openly, you know, these people in our population that are not going to survive as the fittest, we need to do something about them. So what are we going to do? Well, we can, Corral them into institutions and keep them there. Or what happens if they’re still not doing what we like? Maybe we should go further and start to do away with them. In other words, to kill them. And that idea was pervasive, as I said, Western Europe, the United States. But the country where this came to really bear fruit, horrible fruit, was in Nazi Germany. After the First World War in Nazi Germany, the economic system was complete and out of shambles. People were starving. People couldn’t get work. It was horrible. And so when Hitler came to power in 1933, as someone who was going to stop all of this horrible situation, he decided that, look, things are so dire in post-World War I Germany that we have to use everyone to contribute to the economy. I’m simplifying, but everyone has to contribute. Well, what are you going to do with people who can’t? People who simply don’t have the wherewithal, their intellectual disabilities, their physical disabilities, They have hereditary diseases. They can’t contribute. Two German lawyers came up with this term that is very, very important in this discussion. They called the people who could not give back economically useless eaters. And those were people who were eating or consuming all kinds of resources but not able to contribute and give back. And so they came up, and this started in 1939, with a program of how to do away with these people. Now, all through from 1933 to 1939, the German public was primed with this. Propaganda movies, everyone in the intelligentsia were all for this. All the arts people were for this. You know, on and on, as you might expect. And in 1939, they decided to develop a killing program. And what they did was it started out kind of under the radar. When children would come into a hospital either deformed, born deformed, or with a disability, they were very quietly dispatched with a lethal injection. Then they figured out that wasn’t working fast enough and not making things perfect enough in a way that was palatable to Nazis. They actually came up with an official German program to kill Germans with disabilities. They knew where they were in the institutions. They knew where they were in villages and in towns. They brought them to six institutions across Germany that were redefined into killing centers. The buses would bring them in. They’d be stripped of their garb. They would be designated for death. and they would be put into, get this, a gas chamber. So when we think of gas chambers in the Holocaust, that’s where the idea started, was in killing Germans with their own disabilities. And I won’t get too much into the detail of that, but that propelled the idea. that we could do away with people who were different. We can do away with people who are not as well or as healthy as we are. We can do away with people who are not as economically viable as other people are. So there’s the distinction about people with disabilities, right? If you have a disability, in some places then, that basically you are marked for either discrimination or in some places for death. And that ties into the whole euthanasia assisted suicide idea, as I’m sure we’ll discuss.
SPEAKER 01 :
So if you’re just tuning in, my special guest today is Dr. Mark Moster. He’s a senior researcher at Able Americans. So Dr. Mark, this is a condition of the heart, right? Somewhere godless people decided that this made sense to them. What’s your message to people today who may, those of us who grew up hearing this survival of the fittest, as you said, and perhaps at the time it made sense, but the way you’re breaking it down, yes, the distinction between the animal world and human beings, but what is your message to the greater population about why this type of thinking and philosophy is a moral issue?
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, it’s a moral issue, first of all, because there is a thing that you and I know is right and wrong. We also know as people of decency and high moral quality that life is precious. And let’s remember that all life is precious. From the very lowliest, the most severe disability, to people who are incredibly creative and brilliant and wonderful, etc., etc. All life matters. And that life matters from conception to natural death. Everything in between matters. And everybody matters equally. What’s happened now, fast forward to where we are today, medical science is so far advanced that we can keep people alive that we could never keep alive even 20 years ago. And the question becomes, should we keep them alive? Well, along comes the assisted suicide and euthanasia crowd who say, no. We don’t have to keep those people alive. They have no quality of life. They can’t make decisions about what they want to do. They’re basically useless. And therefore, we want to help them die a quote unquote dignified death. Now, again, as with Darwin, that idea is kind of nice if you’re debating it in a university debate, right? In the real world, this is actually happening. Ground zero right now, Canada. Canada passed euthanasia laws in 2016. Today, in 2026, Canada’s fifth leading cause of death in the population is euthanasia. It’s just exploded. And here’s the point of the slippery slope. When people say, well, you know, we have guardrails, we have laws, we have policies. It can’t possibly go wrong. Oh, yes, it can. And it does very often. Number one, the medical profession are now trained to see euthanasia as a, quote, unquote, viable medical treatment. They truly see it as a treatment, right? You have a problem. One way we treat that is by killing you. It’s as simple as that. And so this idea has gone through all the medical professions and it’s everywhere today. Talking about the guidelines, every country starts the same. This started in Holland, in Belgium, all over Europe. They say, well, it’s for very few people at the end of their lives. They have to be within six months of dying. They have to be in incredible, unbearable, untreatable pain. So it starts out very small for very few people, right? But what’s happened in every situation, including what’s going on in Canada, is that that starts to expand and expand and expand, the old slippery slope argument. And indeed, it’s a valid one. So Canada in 2016 went from euthanizing only people within six months of death with untreatable pain, physical pain. They went from that to now, where they will euthanize you if you can convince them that you’re depressed and you can’t see it getting better, or you have some kind of physical disability you’re tired of living with. Case in point, two weeks ago in Canada, a 26-year-old man who was blind in one eye and had a history of depression went to his family and said, well, a year ago, he said to them, I want to request euthanasia. How does that work? You go in to see a doctor who’s probably already a pro-euthanasia guy. And you say, these are my reasons. And they say, well, we’ll bring in a consult. Well, the consult also thinks that this is a good idea. If two doctors agree in Canada and sign off on it, they can kill you. And that’s what this guy did. And he was scheduled for euthanasia about a year ago. And his parents actually got it stopped. I mean, they did a great job. Two weeks ago, he called them and he said, I haven’t told you this before, but today’s the day I’m going to die. And indeed, for being blind in one eye and having a history of depression at 26 years of age, he was put to death by the Canadian authorities under a law called, get this, medical aid in dying. See, it’s a medical aid to help you get out and off this planet. That’s how evil, that’s how surreal this is, but very real in the real world.
SPEAKER 01 :
This is what we’re seeing. And are you seeing this mostly in socialized countries where it’s probably cheaper for the government to assist you in ending your life? Because, well, my husband’s from Canada. We talk a lot about the Canadian social medical program and how you can wait a long time even to get help. You’re on a list and they’re not really, you know, prioritizing helping certain people. I mean, are we seeing this mostly in socialized countries?
SPEAKER 04 :
Socialized countries and everywhere else, actually. This whole pro-death movement, which I’ve always said is a movement to have death on demand anytime, anywhere, for anyone. for any purpose that’s their ultimate goal right now in the united states we euthanasia is not legal anywhere but we have 12 states plus dc that allow for assisted suicide and as i’ve explained that’s the thin end of the wedge if we don’t think we’re going to get euthanasia down the road good luck it’s coming yes the case in point about socialized medicine is very important in fact there are several anecdotes on out of canada in one case one woman had been suffering in chronic pain for about 12 years, I think it was. It was an incredibly long period of time. And because no one was addressing the pain issue, she said, I’m just going to offer myself up for euthanasia. I’m going to request. I can’t stand the pain anymore and the way I’m living. I can’t go out. I don’t socialize. I sit in my little apartment. I can’t go on with this anymore. The Canadian authorities said, we think that’s a good idea. Why? Because he has to treat you. You’ve waited eight years for the treatment. We haven’t gotten it to you yet. So let’s just go ahead and kill you. It turned out that a very well-known radio host in the States, I won’t mention names, but he intervened, got her flown down to Florida where they took care of her pain in about a week and a half. And guess what? After her pain was taken care of, She no longer wanted to kill herself. That happens a lot in terms of disabilities and in terms of depression, where people feel their lives will never get better. And the research is very clear. If you lift the depression, they don’t want to kill themselves anymore. What a shock. The problem is these medical ghouls are getting to these people before they can alleviate whatever’s wrong with them and offering them as a very viable alternative euthanasia. And the economic situation is exactly that. It’s way cheaper to be slightly cynical. It’s way cheaper to kill someone than to treat them. It’s as simple as that.
SPEAKER 01 :
So, Dr. Mostert, as you’re looking at the lay of the land and as far as policy goes, are you noticing, as you said, a slippery slope in the United States with policy changing towards supporting more euthanasia laws?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, we’re not at the stage yet of where euthanasia has come to the fore and it’s going to be discussed, whatever. But here’s the deal. When you have 12 states and D.C. who now actually allow assisted suicide, that whole argument about autonomy, the whole argument about it’s my body, my choice, it’s my right to kill myself if I want to is going to get stronger and stronger and stronger. So, what the, the pro death crowd do is that they have very strong coalitions in every state that started in Washington state in the late nineties, and then just spread across the country. There’s legislation or pending legislation policy. Now, I think in another 18 or 20 states to legalize assisted suicide, what you need to do with policy say a couple of things. 1. Most illnesses, even terminal illnesses, are absolutely treatable in terms of comfort and pain reduction. There’s only a tiny, tiny fraction of 1% of cases that can’t be controlled. Medical technology and medication now is able to keep you comfortable no matter how badly off you are. And that’s what we suggest. We need policies where people are afforded the right and the dignity to go to their natural deaths in as much comfort and pain-free as we can keep them. That’s number one. Number two, we’ve got to change the culture of death. This starts on the other end of life with abortion. You know this. By the way, just sidebar, with genetic testing, we now abort children with disabilities in the womb more so than we don’t. The country of Iceland bragged several years ago that they do not have any Down syndrome children in the country. Why? Amniocentesis is mandatory. Find out in utero that the child has Down syndrome, the child is aborted. They actually came out and bragged, we have no Down syndrome people in our country. Now, if that doesn’t talk to discrimination, and if that doesn’t talk to nasty, evil ways of dealing with human beings that are slightly different, I don’t know what is.
SPEAKER 01 :
So again, condition of the heart, how we’re now in this generation of young people, let’s talk to parents and let’s talk to teachers. How do we in a government system really get this message across about valuing life? Because I think that’s gotta be the fundamental message, right? In order for us to not go down this path of creating a culture and a society that kills its own.
SPEAKER 04 :
I think that’s very true. And there’s a lot of different ways to do that. I think the first is exactly what we’re doing here. We’re providing a bit of a little peep into this world that is admittedly very dark and very evil. But people literally don’t know that this goes on. If you talk to the average person on the street and you say, do you know what in Canada, if you don’t feel good about yourself and you can convince two doctors to kill you, they will. People would think you’re crazy, right? But this is the context they don’t have what we’re talking about right now. So the 1st thing is, you need to have the knowledge about what’s gone on before. You cannot inform policy now. Unless you look at what’s come in the past, otherwise you can make the same mistake for people families with children with elderly parents, some of the disability, a serious illness in the family. Be aware and understand that not everyone who’s a doctor is going to not go along with this. More doctors than you would imagine, even in states where it’s not legal, go along with assisted suicide and euthanasia. So one of the things I would recommend, we need to make policies about informed consent stronger, right? So when you go to a doctor and you say, what are all my options? They might bring up that option. And then you need to say, why would you do that rather than keep me comfortable whatever time I have left? We need to challenge the medical professions when they bring this up and try to coerce people as they do. If we look at how people are interviewed in the United States by genetic testing, the vast preponderance of doctors, once that testing reveals some kind of genetic anomaly, the vast number of doctors will advise, you need to abort the child because this child’s gonna have a poor quality of life, this child’s never gonna finish high school, this child’s never gonna play on the football team, and wouldn’t this child essentially be better off if it wasn’t in the world? That is as pernicious a nastiness as I can think about what we call the pro-life side of the things, where you have medical people actually advocate for killing people, children, people at the end of their lives, whatever. The other part of the policy is we need to have informed lawmakers. Lawmakers in most states, they know as little as the layperson on the street about these things, right? And understandably so. But here’s what needs to happen. What happens is these pro-death groups come in. They infiltrate committees at state level. They infiltrate committees at the county level. They then start pushing all these policies further, and they kind of bubble up. to the state level. And then you have politicians who pretty much in many of the states that we’re talking about are fairly far left. They offer abortion, et cetera, et cetera. So they help grease the wheels in getting these pro-death policies in place. We have to reverse that. We have to go to people who don’t agree with that, people who are pro-life and say, we need a policy that is pro-life. You can’t simply kill people because they ask you to. You can flower it all around with, we did this diagnosis and this whatever. This is the basic intent. We’ve got to stop that. At a national level, we have to have this conversation, just like we had the pro-life conversation around abortion, which eventually… got the overturning of Roe v. Wade 50 years later. We have to start having these conversations about policy now. People are going to hospitals. Their families are blindsided by this kind of stuff. They have no idea. And ladies and gentlemen, you don’t want to be facing these terribly difficult questions when you have a loved one in a coma. You want to be informed and prepared ahead of time. How you do that, look at your state policies about things like living wills or advanced directives. See how powerful those are in your states. Look at the policies of hospitals that you go to. What did they say about treating people who are quote-unquote futile cases? Those are policies in place. Go and have a look at those policies. See if you agree with them. If you don’t, find another hospital because you never know if you’re in that situation. You are going to, not all the time, I’m generalizing, but there’s a good chance that you will be coerced towards these kinds of pro-death things rather than on the side of life. The policies have to change by us being educated, by us standing up for this, by us questioning when lawmakers go along with this stuff. Get involved at your local level, get involved at the state level, and that’s the only way we’re going to turn this around. We’re behind the eight ball. This crowd is well-funded, very well-funded. They receive millions and millions of dollars, and it creeps in everywhere. And here’s the part that is most dangerous. Well, one of the parts. This is obviously all dangerous, right? One of the parts that is most dangerous is is that I won’t tell you where you can find them, but there are actual videos of someone committing assisted suicide. The strongest part of the argument is how peaceful it is. You have to be careful about that. We peacefully killed you. Think about what that says about us as a society. We peacefully killed you because we think this is a quote-unquote viable medical treatment. It’s astonishing, it’s surprising, and it’s heartbreaking in the end.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, it seems like the left will decorate and package it, like you said, in this flowery, beautiful way when really at the core of it is something that’s very dark and evil. So what do you say in response to you conservatives… only care about certain lives, you know, but what about these lives that are, you know, they have disabilities, you know, where’s the support for them? How do you respond or what kind of policies do we need to have in place to support parents who might be afraid to bring a child with Down syndrome into the world or something like that?
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s a very interesting and a very good question because we don’t have enough resources to help those people. Even in the United States, we don’t have enough to support them. Now, we do have a lot. I think we have probably more than a lot of countries in the Western world. But that is a major issue. We at Able Americans are trying right now to influence legislation, for example, about simple things to support people with disabilities that you and I would say, why isn’t this policy? For example… If you have a child with severe disabilities and the state is supporting that, and very minimally, I might add, unless it’s medical, which they support pretty much through Medicaid, you know, it’s not as good as it should be. However, if you as a parent decide you want to move to another state, that care from state A to state B is not transferable. So when you get to state B, you go to the bottom of the eight-year waiting list with no services at all. None. Those are the kind of policy issues that we’re addressing. Another policy issue we’re addressing is this whole idea of how much people can save while still being on Medicaid and Medicare. They set these limits in the 70s or the 80s. So right now, if you earn more than about, depending on your situation, but if you earn more than about $2,000 or $2,500 a month, they will cut your support from the government accordingly. So what that does means it disincentivizes people to work because if they make over a certain amount, their benefits are going to get cut. That also means that they are more dependent on the government and not on themselves, when many of them can be fairly independent. And thirdly, why can’t you save money even while you’re on these benefits? Let me tell you, there is fraud. I understand that, okay? But let me tell you that the constraints that are put on you when you have that kind of disability, they examine you uphill and down, Dale, to make sure that you really have the disability. And they do that, by the way, every year. You’ve got to go through the whole rigmarole. David right now, who’s our CEO, he has a son with severe autism. I mean, he’s nonverbal. He operates, Dave will tell you, at the age of about a three-year-old. He’s 21, 22. He has to be in a group home. Every year, David has to fill out the exact same paperwork for his son to prove that he still has the disability. His son’s never going to get better. This is it. It’s not going to happen. But every year he has to go through that whole rigmarole, plus then the anxiety of are they going to fund it or are they not? I think he lives in a group home. I think his care is somewhere in the region of $40,000, $50,000 a year. If you cut that off, what happens to his son? Well, he’s going to get kicked out of assisted living. Then you’ve got a major problem. So we’re not doing enough policy wise. But we at the center are trying and able Americans are trying to do that. We have some very, very good ends on Capitol Hill. We’re working with some senators and people in the House to put forward these at least these small steps in the right direction. That’s what we were hoping to do.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, Dr. Mark Mostert, thank you so much for being here. And thank you for your work as a senior researcher at Able Americans and bringing a big voice to this very important topic of assisted suicide and euthanasia. And to my listeners, thanks for tuning in and catch me next time. And remember, educating the mind without the heart is no education. So seek wisdom, cultivate virtue, and speak truth.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thanks for tuning in to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Rahn. Visit PriscillaRahn.com to connect or learn how you can sponsor future episodes to keep this message of faith, freedom, and education on the air.
