By DONALD DeMARCO
The January 22, 2015 March for Life in Washington, D.C., drew an estimated 500,000 pro-life supporters. Christopher White, a fellow of the Paul Ramsey Institute, has lamented the fact that that “major media outlets largely ignored the March over the past decade” (“The 40-Year March for Life,” The Human Life Review, winter, 2013, p. 36). He had specifically in mind The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today.
Apparently not all news is deemed newsworthy. It is difficult for any fair-minded person to believe that an event that has been taking place for more than 40 years, and has consistently drawn huge gatherings, should receive such paucity of media attention.
The Washington Post, for one, did find quite newsworthy the assisted suicide death of 29-year-old Brittany Maynard in its November 3, 2014 edition.
Brittany Maynard was diagnosed with brain cancer early in 2014. She was determined to wrest control of the malady by ending her life. Having changed her residence from San Francisco to Oregon, where physician-assisted suicide is legal, she scheduled her death for November 1 of that same year. As The Washington Post reported, she kept her “promise.” In addition to The Washington Post, her story was told by USA Today, the New York Daily News, People magazine, CBC’s This Morning, CNN, YouTube, on her own online blog, and through other venues.
Compassion and Choices, an advocacy group for assisted suicide, cooperated with her on YouTube and released a statement concerning her death, defining it as “death with dignity.” The name of this group, incidentally, formerly known as “The Hemlock Society,” employs two words that have no logical connection either with death or with assisted suicide. Compassion is a virtue that allows us to feel another’s pain. It is by no means a signal that justifies killing another. Compassion, as a virtue rooted in love, should incline people to offer others greater care, not to end their lives. At the same time, “choices” could just as easily be for life, and not necessarily for death.
The name “Compassion and Choices” is pure rhetoric. It is comparable to sale’s slogans such as “The Maximum for the Minimum” which could be logically understood as the maximum price for the minimum value.
Whereas there is ambiguity in the title Compassion and Choices, there is no ambiguity about the group’s single-minded dedication to promoting assisted suicide. Vermont passed a suicide assistance bill on May 20, 2014. This law was initiated by Compassion and Choices. By the first anniversary of its enactment, not a single citizen of the Green Mountain State had taken advantage of it. As a result, Compassion and Choices (based in Denver) stepped up its efforts to persuade Vermont patients to make the choice for doctor-prescribed suicide. The organization went so far as to hire a state director to promote the use of the law.
The major media have played an effective role in promoting the culture of death. The fact that the choice for death by one person, Brittany Maynard, could receive more thorough coverage from major media outlets than the resounding choices for life made by hundreds of thousands of marchers in Washington, D.C., is an overwhelmingly clear indication that the media are on the side of the culture of death. It is one thing for people to express their profound sympathy for Brittany’s tragic situation (and, indeed, they should).
But it is quite another for people to endorse, even applaud, the manner in which she chose to end her life.
Assisted suicide is taking place on a larger scale than that of the desperate individual. The media are assisting culture itself to embrace it. Moreover, the prevalence of a relativistic philosophy is also assisting in the suicide of culture. Pope Benedict XVI, in an address he gave to the General Assembly of the United Nations (April 8, 2008), stated: “A culture that cuts itself off from the great ethical and religions forces of its own history, commits suicide.” Both atheism and relativism assist in the transformation of culture into one of the culture of death. They assist in the suicide of culture which, in turn, influences pain-stricken individuals to believe that death is their only choice.
It is not an easy thing for people to resist the influence of the media. The Church, the great guardian of the best of tradition, has a most daunting task in conveying to people their true dignity and that every human life, no matter how wretched, is of inestimable value. Our society should invest itself more in assisted living than in assisted dying.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest work, How to Remain Sane in a World That Is Going Mad, is available through Amazon.com. Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum.)
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