In the first case, we can see the wisdom of giving regard to the wider picture of ecological well-being and the importance of protecting life as it is. We have come to accept that life as we find it has its own purpose or role in the overall scheme of things. Mostly the battle over respecting life is against corporate self-interest.
In the second case, the battle is against human life. With abortion, one would expect activists to be pushing the boundary for recognition of human status for the foetus closer and closer to conception because the living material undergoing its transformation is human from the start. Instead, the focus is of the adult (plural) self-interest. As for euthanasia, given the zeitgeist of individualism and incredulity as to the largesse of suffering, the "right to die" is rapidly becoming the "duty to die". As shown by the case studies of Belgium and Nova Scotia, more and more people are being killed as guidelines become more permissive and categories added - children under 12 in Belgium and mental illness in Nova Scotia.
What to make of this death-seeking activism? An Australian commentator offers some insight.
First, there is the matter of whether the taking of human life is involved:
Those who defend assisted dying acknowledge that it involves taking a life. Many who defend abortion deny it, seeing the foetus as part of the woman’s own body. That argument recognises in part the unique status of the foetus. It begins and grows in a woman’s body, and so can be seen as part of her body. It is, however, a unique part of her body in that it has and develops the potential for independent life. To that extent it is also a living being in its own right. This double status of the move from dependence to independence of the foetus means that there is a physical difference between removing a foetus early in term, late in term and taking the life of a child after birth.
In most Australian states abortion is available for up to twenty weeks when it is conducive to the health of the pregnant woman, and also later though subject to further restrictions. At this stage the foetus can move and hear. It seems reasonable to describe abortion at this stage as taking life [...].
Second, should the focus be on the individual choice - of the person who is pregnant or who seeks assistance to die - or should there be regard to the more complex social picture? The community's capture by the individualism of our age...
[...] prioritises one of many relationships involved in a person’s life and death. In the case of abortion, these include the relationship to the man involved in the conception, to family and friends, employers and fellow workers, [prospective adoptive parents], and doctors and nurses participating in the abortion. In the case of assisted dying, they also include family and friends, and participating doctors, nurses and hospital staff involved.
More broadly in each case they include the relationship to society as a whole through the effects that individual decisions have on social attitudes. Many people have an interest in the taking of life. Whether the choice of the pregnant woman and the person who seeks to have their life ended should be decisive, and if so with what qualifications, is the ethical question in dispute in both cases.
Third, where does the sacredness of life, imputed to the natural world, stand with regard the human being?
In both [abortion and euthanasia] the move in society and consequently in legislation is to privilege individual freedom of choice. The exercise of this right trumps countervailing claims ultimately based on the sacredness of life. By sacredness I mean the conviction that each human being and consequently their life, has such a high value that it forbids them and others from deliberately taking life for pragmatic reasons.
This evaluation of human life underlays the serious penalties against murder, the stigma attaching to suicide, and past legislation against abortion and euthanasia. Such legislation did not prevent abortion. Not did it prevent people who wished to die from arranging it. But it did initially express the shared conviction that murder, abortion and assisted suicide were destructive of society.
The strong emphasis on the sacredness of life, however, often resulted in a stigma being attached to suicide and to abortion that could cripple the lives of people who were already heavily burdened. Public awareness of such suffering has fed the compassion that underlies the popular support for legislative change.
Therefore, we have seen individualism and an untethered compassion take hold of the public and the legislature:
[T]he sanctity of human life is no longer seen as a value that overrides other values. In certain circumstances individuals may take their own or others’ lives to secure other competing goods. They may choose to be killed rather than to live with dementia or in pain, for example, or to abort a foetus because of the burden imposed by raising a child to financial survival, to career, family relationships or reputation. Society [is granted a role to] ensure that such decisions are free, informed and duly regulated, but has no higher interest or responsibility.
Fourth, this has consequences:
The logic of individual choice will result in regulation being loosened or ignored over time. Think of profit-making through financial chicanery, gambling, pornography and drinking [and cigarettes].
If this move to privilege individual choice over the claims of the sanctity of life continues and becomes more pervasive, what will be the effects on society? They are unlikely to be immediate or dramatic.
The more significant effects of the emphasis on individual choice on the taking of life, however, lie in the nature of individual choice. Because the choice is individual it is inevitably open to conflict with the choice of others. In the case of abortion and assisted dying, the choice of the pregnant woman to abort a child or of persons who wish their lives to be ended may conflict with the choice of relatives, doctors, nurses and the owners of hospitals not to be complicit in the abortion or assisted dying.
These kinds of conflict then need to be resolved by legislation. In this way the free choice of one group of people will be privileged by the exercise of power that limits the freedom to choose of other groups. This inevitably strengthens the power of the State and of its agents in matters of life and death.
The dangers of this can be seen in the way in which in Australia and elsewhere the State handles its responsibilities for taking life through its military actions in other nations. The will of the Executive prevails without reference to Parliament, is buttressed by secrecy, has no consideration for the effects of war on the people affected by it during the military action or after it is called off. Respect for reason, for the value of each human being and for the common good is trumped by the exercise of power for strategic and economic interests.
It is to be feared that in time, the power of the State and its agents to regulate whether people live and die will be exercised in a similarly overbearing way that limits individual choice. The recent switch of the Chinese Government, with its increasing use of technology to control individual lives, from tacitly allowing abortions in support of its one child policy to actively discouraging them in the interests of economic growth, is a straw in the wind.
For his conclusion, the writer of this valuable commentary, Andrew Hamilton, a Jesuit priest and academic, has this warning:
When individual choice becomes king in society, the groups most vulnerable include people who are deprived of choice by age or by marginalisation. They have no access to power. These include classically the unborn and the intellectually handicapped, but also significantly the increasing number of elderly people who suffer from dementia.
Once governments have assumed the power to decide matters of life and death, and have in place structures that allow its educated agents to make those decisions, the pressure to assist them to die unknowing as part of good economic management will increase. This could be commended by an appeal to compassion for their diminished condition and for their relatives who must observe it.
The suicide of the human race is upon us. Is that an exaggeration? There are many signs that it is not over the top. There is the loss of a sense of the Transcendent in WEIRD countries - Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic - giving rise to a nihilistic spirit; there is the falling birthrate that signals that the younger generations have lost hope in the future, and that they lack an appreciation of the fact that it is their role to create a future for each community. Finally, there is the impulse to kill, compassionate but in a deformed way, which we have examined here.
For the Christian, however, hope should spring eternal, to paraphrase Alexander Pope's words in An Essay on Man (1732). Pope knew that the complexities of life were nothing compared with God's power to remedy what fails to comply with his loving plan.
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