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| Permissive older generations have blinded the young. Photo: Elizaveta Dushechkina |
Even though under the law or by court ruling abortion or euthanasia/assisted suicide might be permitted, it does not make it ethical—the right and just behaviour that reflects the nobility of the human person.
Such issues come before legislatures and are most often passed, reflecting the poor state of moral understanding in Western societies these days. But all such laws strike at the core of human dignity.
"I want to to be in control of my life" may be a handy slogan when advocating for physician-assisted suicide, but it has been rightly pointed out that such a stance besmirches all doctors, though it is a minority who are willing to engage in this ultimate form of patient abandonment, instead of alleviating by appropriate management of drugs any physical or mental suffering a patient may encounter in the journey to their life's destination.
For sure, the ultimate failure of health care is when a health care professional chooses to eliminate the sufferer as a means of alleviating suffering.
The Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) notes the dignity of the human person, who is made in the image of God and enveloped in a personal relationship with God, which leads him to the conclusion that the person committing suicide “usurps to himself judgment of a matter not entrusted to him”.
In traditional Christian moral theology, suicide is understood to be “intrinsically evil”, meaning that it can never be pursued, even for the sake of another good like alleviating the patient’s suffering.
In addition, there is no morally acceptable “form of complicity or active or passive collaboration” in suicide. Instead, a doctor must respect “the gift of [a patient’s] life” over “the will of the patient” who seeks to end his or her life.
Any [medical] action taken should be in harmony with divine principles regarding the transcendent value of life.
Christian love is the animating principle of health care, through which suffering is seen as participation in the redemptive power of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection. That is, suffering has a value for the patient and for the family and friends of the sufferer, though this may be appreciated only by those with spiritual insight, sight unblinkered by the ignoble fear of offence to personal pride that sickness may bring. A case in point might be this one, of a British TV personality worried at losing control over her life, though she has a loving son to support her on that journey to death.
As opposed to assisted suicide, the key point in care of the dying is that patients should be kept as free of pain as much as possible so that they may die comfortably and with dignity, but actions should not be taken with the intent to hasten that death.
So, even though the law of the land, or a ruling by a court of law, may permit abortion, doctor-assisted suicide, or suicide itself, there are strong ethical reasons in the secular sense—such as respect for the person and protection of order in society as a whole—why the permission should not be exercised in fact. A law allowing an act does not make it morally right or an imperative that such an act be exercised.
We see this with the number of abortions in the United States declining markedly from around 1990 until 2017, after which there has been an uptick. Just because some act is allowed, does not mean people should act in that way.
From the Christian perspective, the ruling principle in moral decisions is that all involved respect the sacredness of every human life from the moment of conception until death.
Christian strictures against abortion and euthanasia are based on the long-held religious moral doctrine concerning the nature of the human person, God’s commandment not to kill, the meaning of human life, the significance of death, and the mission to offer healing that dates back to the earliest days of the Church so that nearly one in five hospitals in the United States are religiously affiliated, not all Christian of course..
Where a morally illiterate or feeling-focused society has permitted physician-assisted suicide, there can be a severe impact on doctors who feel pressured by society to comply with a person's own request or the request to end suffering by family when they know there is a medical path to alleviating suffering, or that death is being forced upon an elderly or sick person when a natural death is possible with appropriate palliative care. 💢
Drawing further on a survey of doctors in the Netherlands used above, it found that “As a result [of societal pressure], physicians may experience less room for a careful decision- making process and . . . may even feel forced to cross their own moral boundaries.”
A US study found that 29% of Mayo Clinic doctors reported that religious or spiritual beliefs influenced their decision to become a doctor and 64% considered religion important in their lives.
This is where the "feel good" nature of much of the legislative action involving abortion and euthanasia in Western countries has a "deadly" social impact, deadly because the slippery slope warned about by opponents of those kinds of laws actually do prove to be slippery. Abortion becomes not just of a "fetus", but of child ready for birth, and even post birth if that is the desire of the mother.
What caused widespread outrage when Delegate Kathy Tran presented a Bill in Virginia that sought to remove restrictions on killing a child any time before birth has been taken up by the Democrat party as a whole, with a Bill that would at least enable just that going to the Senate. As for assisted suicide, the examples of Belgium and the Netherlands illustrate vividly how slippery the slope is.
This was made clear in Britain's Economist in a column, "The slippery slope of assisted dying is real". It states:
First, there is a steady increase year on year in the number of people being killed or helped to commit suicide by their doctors. Second, once assisted dying has been legalised for one category of people, it is only a matter of time before it is extended to others.
In 2002, euthanasia was legalised for adults in Belgium who met certain criteria, the main one being that they must be in “constant and unbearable physical or psychological pain” resulting from an accident or an incurable illness. In 2014, the law was extended to children of any age who were terminally ill. In 2002, just 24 people were euthanised in Belgium. Between 2016 and 2017 a record 4,337 cases were reported to the authorities. In the same year, three children were killed by lethal injection. These were the first minors since the law was broadened to include them.
In Belgium, euthanasia is not limited to those with terminal illnesses. People have been euthanised because of a wide range of conditions, including depression, blindness, deafness, gender-identity crisis and anorexia. In 2014, a prisoner serving a life sentence for rape and murder was given permission for an assisted suicide. Although not envisaged in the original law, organ-donation regulations have now been introduced in cases of assisted dying, raising the unsettling prospect of organ harvesting.
The Netherlands also introduced assisted dying in 2002. The figures also show year-on-year increases. In 2017, the total number of euthanasia cases reported was a staggering 6,585, a massive increase from the 1,923 reported in 2006.
In Switzerland, figures from the Federal Statistics Office show that the number of Swiss residents who died by assisted suicide rose from just 43 in 1998 to more than 1,000 in 2015.
The writer also finds that advocates typically go soft on initial proposals, aiming only to break through existing moral barriers as a first step, while intending to continue to lobby for an extension of the law to the desired full (horrifying) outcome at a later date.
Society at present is showing how morally unhinged a population can become. Christian principles of love and compassion and respect for human dignity have been taken up by advocates for causes like gender ideology, abortion and suicide, even though the outcomes would destroy all the value placed on life that Christian insights uphold and society so desires.
Society is in danger of losing its ability to protect the vulnerable, which includes the young, the sick and the old, because of the loss of an understanding of the worth of every person from their beginning to their end. Life is no longer seen as a journey, and adventure, where each person is challenged to become a better version of themselves, where each step is taken accompanied by the One who loves. Suffering is part of that journey, and the examples of how people grow through the experience of personal strife are innumerable.
But neglect of the vulnerable is also a picture of itself that Western society paints large. In Canada, there has been much discussion about how the medical assistance in death programme enables the government to save money that would otherwise would be spent on healthcare of the sick person.
Here is a compassionate response to a news story:
What a tragic failure we have been to young Eric Coulam. It’s only been six years since Canada legalized euthanasia and while it was first justified as something necessary for those with a terminal illness in the last days of their life, it has now become something nearly everyone can access, including young Canadians who are not able to secure the medical help they need to live.
It is an example of moral decay that we now live in a country where every resource is available to end the life of the sufferer, rather than find solutions to the suffering. The slippery slope is real and it’s time for Canadians to demand an end to this ever-expansive euthanasia regime.
Young people—Generation Z—are most captivated by a belief that there should be no restrictions on a person's freedom. In being captured by such a belief, which is aided and abetted by the globalised corporate system, they are prey to those who promote the lie that pursuing personal desires makes you free. The intellectual elite of news media and academia go further in an ambition to manipulate social behaviour so that the result is that the good of society is at a far second to individual desire and the self-invention of identity, no matter how unbalanced that desire or identity might be.
Older generations have taught the young well, but the lessons learned are predominantly from the bad example of marital infidelity and divorce, of the addiction to making money, of devoting time and energy into building reputation, in neglect of the family's spiritual life, and in lack of investment in care of the community, with the outcomes among the young of soaring confusion over sexual identity, and staggering levels of drug addiction and mental health difficulties.
WEIRD societies—Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic—have to accept they have got on to the wrong path as far as the dominant ideology or metaphysical outlook is concerned. An overhaul of the value system that is being promoted worldwide by the West must be rejected and the riches of the Christian tradition brought to the fore afresh.
A starting point is to understand that what the law permits is not the moral standard for our behaviour. We must see that the foundation of well-being in society is not personal freedom but the common good of the whole community. That is the lesson society's elders need to hand down to the next generations.
💢 See also:
The duty to die: the hidden assisted-death imperative
Suffering: Why does God allow it?
Journey to death should go all the way
💢 Kirsten Evenblij et al., Physicians’ Experiences with Euthanasia: A Cross-Sectional Survey Amongst a Random Sample of Dutch Physicians to Explore Their Concerns, Feelings and Pressure, 20 BMC Fam. Prac., no. 177, 2019, at 9.
💢 See also this source
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