Compassion exploited as a mere rhetorical tool

                                                                                                                                 Photo by Shvets production from Pexels

Both at the beginning of life and at its conclusion the forces of death exploit the rhetoric of compassion. 

The secular French writer, Michel Houellebecq, has said: 

Partisans of euthanasia like to gargle on words whose meanings they distort to such an extent that they should no longer even have the right to utter them. In the case of “compassion”, the lie is palpable.

He would argue that instead of building a healthcare system that supports and advocates for the sick, the disabled, the mentally ill, so that they get the care due to a person with innate dignity, the non-rational, specifically, the sentimental approach to existential questions comes into play so that activists substitute the human capacity for dealing with reality "with a shallower more animal concept of good health".  

Another comment of this kind comes in a column by Andrew Hamilton on how the central argument of those advocating abortion and those supporting euthanasia is that death will improve the "lives of people who were already heavily burdened", whether poor or unsupported mothers, or the sick and disabled:

Public awareness of such suffering has fed the compassion that underlies the popular support for legislative change.

Hamilton foresees the time when governments will have taken on the task of directing the application of euthanasia, perhaps in the decades ahead when there will be a deluge of elderly in a swiftly fading economy. Such aggressive decisions could easily entail...

[...] an appeal to compassion for their [the 'patient's'] diminished condition and for their relatives who must observe it.

The focus on compassion as the foundation for legislation that involves life and death situations is fraught with danger for society because it tends be myopic over long-term implications.

To examine this aspect of social re-engineering,  British writer Mary Harrington has compiled a  list of unexpected outcomes of the "feminist" push to widen access to contraception and abortion.

One US study shows that the availability of oral contraceptives so increased demand for extra-marital sex that — because the method wasn’t 100% reliable — it also increased the rate of extra-marital pregnancies by around 15%. 

Linked to this statistic is the one involving the introduction of legal abortion in that the number of "shotgun weddings" fell by a greater percentage than that of the extra-marital pregnancies, meaning that the male party was given license to walk away scot-free of any responsibility for the child when the mother opted not to abort.

Thus, while advocates of legal abortion believed that it would reduce instances of single motherhood, its paradoxical effect was the opposite. By relieving social pressure on men to step up after impregnating a woman, legalising abortion accelerated the prevalence of single motherhood — a phenomenon now widely recognised as a central to the feminisation of poverty.

Compassion is powerful as a rhetorical tool, but it can quickly fade. Harrington sees a case in point with the introduction of legalised abortion in Britian. She goes on "to draw out a more general implication: that when a previously unavoidable life experience becomes avoidable, wider attitudes to that experience will change. And for some, it’ll stop being a matter for sympathy."

Therefore, unmarried mothers came to be seen by some in the political realm as "lazy, parasitic 'welfare scroungers'”:

[T]hose who took this position assumed that because such women could have terminated a pregnancy, the duties following on having not done so should be wholly on their shoulders. In other words: if suffering is avoidable, the choice to suffer comes to be seen as wholly private.

This could be carried over into attitudes toward the disabled - if parents did not abort a child who would be born with disabilities, or if disabled people themselves choose to not kill themselves, then they should accept the financial - and all - burdens of their decision.

Harrington:

And notwithstanding cruel conservative stereotypes, it’s overwhelmingly scarcity that drives the “choice” to end a pregnancy. In the US, the poorest 12% of women account for almost 50% of abortions. And a glance through women’s stories swiftly illustrates just how far the individual “choice” to end a pregnancy is often far from free, but rather a reluctant decision driven overwhelmingly by poverty.

In a world where dwindling welfare resources are ever more grudgingly funded by a shrinking working-age population, it’s easy to imagine the arguments from scarcity that will follow, ever more explicitly, upon the transformation of terminal illness into a “choice”. Indeed, they’re already foreshadowed by an assessment of assisted suicide by the Canadian government, which noted that legalisation “could reduce annual health care spending across Canada by between $34.7 million and $138.8 million”.

Those individualists now pushing to extend “choice” to the end of life are still wedded to a hyper-individualist twentieth-century mindset that relies on an ever-expanding welfare state to underwrite its freedoms. But they’re not paying attention: the age of abundance that shaped that dream of endless choice is already over.

And yet they push on. If they succeed, many people now healthy will face terminal illness in a “care” landscape created by individualists, for a society that’s enshrined “choice” over any public duty of compassion — and that can no longer afford a publicly-funded care infrastructure to pick up the pieces. I don’t want to live in a world where ‘tough-minded’ right-liberals write op-eds implying that those with terminal illnesses who refuse the Socratic way out are selfish parasites.

A cynic might argue that given all this, adjusting the statute book to allow for a 21st-century “lapot” [ritual killing of elderly]  is merely sensible. But if this is so, we should drop the rhetoric about freedom and compassion. We should be under no illusions about what [assisted-dying legislation] is for, or about the callously neo-Roman attitude to human life that will follow in its wake.

So all of this can be seen as "sentimental homicide". As one scholar put it:

We should not think that the Dutch or Nazis were terribly different from our contemporary suicide advocates, for part of their propaganda was the call to allow self-killing as a means to avoid profound and intractable pain and suffering. In their misguided attempts to do this, their movement was driven by the logic of its principles to permit deliberate and unconsented killing of the incompetent.

Diana Johnson, who this year introduced to the British parliament an amendment to decriminalize abortion, that is, removing all oversight of the removal of members of the next generation, received a letter from more than 800 medical professionals asking her not to take her proposal to the vote. Such was the response, the proposal went nowhere. What the medical people told her was:

Your proposal to allow abortion up to birth in this country would be to attack the heart of the medical profession — our core duty to protect life whenever and wherever possible. Such an extreme and radical abortion law has no place in the United Kingdom. 

The insight that such a death-promoting law struck at life-supporting principles at the heart of the national character is also seen in the concluding thought of Houellebecq in his article quoted here but which first appeared in Le Figaro newspaper in Paris at the time of a planned euthanasia law change in France. Houellebecq wrote:

The honour of a civilisation is not exactly nothing. But really something else is at stake; from the anthropological point of view. It is a question of life and death. And on this point I am going to have to be very explicit: when a country — a society, a civilisation — gets to the point of legalising euthanasia, it loses in my eyes all right to respect. It becomes henceforth not only legitimate, but desirable, to destroy it; so that something else — another country, another society, another civilisation — might have a chance to arise.

The hedonistic spirit abroad among the elite of many societies and so among the general public is that freedom of individual behaviour is of the highest value. The discipline needed for a rational ordering of personal life and society as a whole has been lost for the most part. That is because darker psychological forces have been allowed to overwhelm the rational. Foremost among those dark forces are passion, guilt, fear, revenge, self-hatred, and despair - and one can add a compassion untethered from moral principles of the highest order. 

Resources linked to euthanasia:

What is the Church's teaching on suicide? See article here

The development of the Catholic Church's teaching on suicide - See here

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