Of 2,025 medical specialists who answered a poll on the subject, 75 per cent said they were “certainly” or “probably” in favour of legalizing euthanasia, as long as the practice were strictly regulated.

The president of the federation of medical specialists, Dr. Gaétan Barrette, said doctors already see some form of euthanasia in the course of their work.

“Eighty one per cent of doctors do see the practice of euthanasia given the circumstances in their practice,” Barrette said. “They hear their patients, they see their patients, asking for it.”

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The story of Sir Edward [Downe]’s “death pact” was at first sight an irresistible love story. His wife Joan, 74, a former ballerina, had a diagnosis of terminal liver and pancreatic cancer; because assisted suicide is illegal in Britain, they traveled to a Zurich clinic, where, for a fee of about $7,000 per patient, the group Dignitas arranges for death by barbiturate. “They drank a small quantity of clear liquid and then lay down on the beds next to each other,” their son Caractacus said. They fell asleep and died within minutes, he reported, calling it a “very civilized” final act.

I have to confess that I find the son’s interpretation of their act as “very civilized” very creepy.  [I also am tempted to crack a "I am Caractacus" joke but pay that no mind].  I could see interpreting that act as loving, sacrificial, or one brought about by deep sadness and the desire to not lead a deteriorating life of loneliness without your soulmate.

But civilized?  Is that the right frame of reference?  Maybe this is just classic British stiff upper lip, jolly good show-ism or something, but civilized I don’t think is the proper frame for which to approach matters of this ambiguous moral (and literally life or death) nature.

I mean we know that anything less than Right Guard is uncivilized.   And it’s not a cookie, it’s fruit and cake.  And so on.  That I get.

But death as civilized?  I mean the opposite of civilized is barbaric right?  If Sir Edward hadn’t partaken of the poisonous draught and lived a few more (undoubtedly very grief-stricken) years without his wife and then died, would that have been barbaric?

Doesn’t strike me that it would have been.  A barbaric death would be one brought about by barbaric actions–e.g torture, murder, sanitized bureaucratic processes that cause people to die because they don’t meet a proper criterion on a line-item.

Otherwise civlized ceases to be about a civilization (where the term comes from), from the civitias, i.e. the city/the commonwealth, and at its worst leads to this kind of thing.

Cue the stereotypical (you could have predicted this was coming) response:

Some euthanasia activists, including Dignitas founder Ludwig Minelli, believe in death on demand. “If you accept the idea of personal autonomy,” he argues, “you can’t make conditions that only terminally ill people should have this right.” Autonomy and dignity are precious values; the phrase sanctity of life can sound sterile and pious in the face of profound pain and suffering. But Minelli is arguing for much more: that autonomy is an overriding right. This view rejects the idea that society might ever value my life more than I do or derive a larger benefit from treating every life as precious, to the point of protecting me from myself.

Now on one level, this is a honest opinion.  I would tweak it slightly to say:  If you accept the exclusive (or primacy of) the idea of personal autonomy”, then Mr. Minelli is in fact correct.  As best as I can surmise, that seems to be Minelli’s real view anyway.  I’m just making it more explicit.  The (il)logical conclusion to such a view is that everyone has a right to kill themselves whenever they wish, and therefore private enterprises should be allowed to flourish which simply assist in that process and those groups should not be interefered with by state entities. [Read more →]

“It is out of characterfor the left to neglect the weak and helpless. The traditional mark of the left has been its protection of the underdog, the weak and the poor. The unborn child is the most helpless form of humanity, even more in need of protection than the poor tenant farmer or the mental patient. The basic instinct of the left is to aid those who cannot aid themselves. And that instinct is absolutely sound. It’s what keeps the human proposition going.” ~ Mary Meehan

I wrote a while ago that I am a professed culture war pacifist.  As the years have gone by and I’ve grown older and (a little bit) wiser, I’ve also become a pacifist in the more traditional sense.  Where once I saw virtue in strength – in the good fight, as it were – I see now only pain and confusion.  War rarely achieves what it sets out to achieve, and victory is at best a mixed bag.  Terror is often in the same futile camp, but as Matt Yglesias notes:

Every time you murder a doctor, you create a disincentive for other medical professionals to provide these services. What’s more, you create a need for additional security at facilities around the country. In addition, the anti-abortion protestors who frequently gather near clinics are made to seem much more intimidating by the fact that the occurrence of these sorts of acts of violence.

In general, I think people tend to overestimate the efficacy of violence as a political tactic. But in this particular case, I think people tend to understate it.

Tiller’s death is the culmination of years of culture war propaganda, fear tactics, and Christianity gone bad.  Religion is not in and of itself good or evil, but in the hands of villains and fanatics it can be a dangerous thing – much as any ideology can be, though there is indeed something more frightening about the religiously charged fanatic.  The pro-life movement has gained nothing from such fairweather spokespeople as Bill O’Reilly who is in it not for the preborn but for himself, not for any particular cause but rather ratings.

In any case, this is not only a blow against life – and specifically the life of George Tiller, who has been brutally ripped from this world and from the lives of his loved ones – but against the pro-life cause.  And not just the specific political cause, either, but against life itself.  Against all causes for life – be they anti-war or anti-abortion or anti-death penalty.

Now I’m not really sure where to place myself on the generic political playing field.  In many respects I would call myself a progressive; on others I might be aptly titled a conservative.  I’m a localist, a decentralist, but I also favor social safety nets.  I’m against a pervasive government, but not against a welfare state.  I’m against military expansion and incursions upon our civil liberties by the state (and big business) but I am in favor of state services, progressive taxes, etc.  On gay rights – and rights in general – I fall amidst the left or the libertarians.  But as Nat Hentoff – an atheist and a leftist – has often noted, progressive politics are ostensibly about protecting the rights of the weakest among us and yet his fellow progressives fail to see how the preborn (or unborn) are, in essence, the by far the weakest of the weak, the most helpless of the helpless.  The right to choose, in contemporary progressive thought, trumps the right to be born (and the preborn have no such capacity for choice). [Read more →]

1 a: the quality that distinguishes a vital and functional being from a dead body b: a principle or force that is considered to underlie the distinctive quality of animate beings c: an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction

~the definition of Life, from the Merriam Webster dictionary (online).

I cannot reconcile myself with the four pillars of the “culture of death.”   Each pillar finds its support at times by various proponents at many points across the political spectrum, making the discussion of life vs death very difficult to pin down politically.  To me, abortion, the death penalty, euthanasia and war are all acts which end the life of a person (or persons) – either a very young person (or fetus), a very bad (or perhaps tragically innocent) person, an enemy, or a person who is either very old or in a great deal of emotional or physical pain.  They are all living beings in possession of a soul, however damnably bad or temporarily interred to the womb that soul may be.  Soul aside, if you happen to not believe in it, they are still human beings possessed of a potentiality that death will snuff out entirely.

A fetus possesses the potentiality of full personhood.  Indeed, there is little else a fetus could become save a baby.  The point at which life begins, scientifically speaking, is the moment of conception.  Philosophically, of course, life is easily redefined.  The debate over abortion often falls on this point.  Ironically, outside of the abortion debate few arguments exist about say the beginning of life for a plant (germination) on either side of the political spectrum.

A criminal condemned to death possess the potentiality to change, to find remorse, salvation etc.  They are also, as I mentioned above, quite possibly innocent.  Beyond this, I oppose the death penalty because it oversteps the reasonable bounds of the state – and in a democracy in particular makes citizens complicit in the extinguishing of human life, whether or not they wish to be.

War, is of course, a difficult concept to grapple with because it is not (always) the decision of a powerful entity to take the life of a non-powerful entity (think: mother and fetus; state and condemned; etc.).  It takes two to tango, as the saying goes.  However preemptive, expansionary, or aggressive wars can rightly be called unjust.  They take the potentiality of peace away from another party – the invaded state or tribe or region.

Assisted suicide generally involves the will of an individual over themselves.  I can envision a state of affairs in which euthanasia becomes the accepted function of the state over people deemed incapable of choosing for themselves (as a matter of efficiency, perhaps), which is not a totally unreasonable fear.  (Read Lois Lowry’s The Giver)  Even without such insidious action by the state, is it possible that the act of assisting someone to end their life robs them of their potential future?  A future which could include breakthroughs in medical science to remove their pain, cure their disease, etc. or a future which might bring some unexpected happiness to assuage their depression?  Or for those simply too old to want to go on living, perhaps a natural death on their own without the need of an assistant to act as usher?

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