By BRIAN CLOWES
(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of chapter 23 of The Facts of Life, “Euthanasia,” e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)
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The primary reason that physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia should be banned is that death is forever, and a diagnosis of coma is never a “sure thing.” In fact, as we have seen, studies show that about 40 percent of all people who are diagnosed as living in a so-called “persistent vegetative state” recover and lead lives that are completely normal or close to normal, requiring a certain degree of assistance.
Euthanasia Sets a Bad Example. One of our most important roles as adults in society is to set a good example for younger and less experienced people. After all, what we teach young people will largely determine how they run the world after they inherit it — and what kind of world our grandchildren will inherit.
What we teach young people will also determine how they treat us when we are elderly and infirm.
The number of young people’s suicides (ages 15 to 24) in the United States was a record 5,731 in 2015, and their suicide rate has nearly doubled since 1965. We read about suicide pacts and teen murder/suicides almost on a weekly basis. Experts in the demographics of suicide (“suicidologists”) call this situation “epidemic.”
What kind of an example does Janet Adkins give to teenagers when she kills herself just because her piano playing is beginning to deteriorate? Or because she may experience some unknown degree of pain eight to ten years down the road — pain that probably could easily be alleviated?
If our society accepts euthanasia, how will we tell a despondent teenager he has no right to kill himself if the cheerleader he adores spurns him? How about the young girl whose pet dies? Or who loses self-respect through premarital sex? Or the boy who doesn’t make the baseball team? Or who flunks out of college?
Young people in general don’t respond well to such an obvious double standard. They don’t accept the command “Do as I say, not as I do.” If euthanasia becomes legal and accepted by society, we must expect our “epidemic” of teen suicide to become a “pandemic,” with perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 cases per year. How will we react to this many cases of teen suicide annually without appearing to be grossly hypocritical?
Some pro-euthanasia activists say that an elderly and sick person choosing to die is totally different from a distraught teenager who wants to “end it all.” They say that euthanasia at the end of life is a brave and rational willingness to “face the inevitable,” while teenagers contemplating suicide are unwilling to face their problems.
But what is the difference between teenagers and elderly people who just don’t want to live any more? To deny the “right to die” to one group of people while granting it to another is discrimination under the law. Already, the Netherlands has euthanized children as young as six years old, in addition to infants, under the Groningen Protocol.
There is certainly a difference between an elderly person in severe pain who is thinking about assisted suicide and a despondent teenaged girl with a bottle of sleeping pills in her hand. But young people contemplating suicide in isolation are not thinking clearly at all, especially if their problems are transitory or relatively easy to solve with the right support. Such distinctions are lost on them.
The Euthanasia Mentality Is Myopic and Lazy. Pro-euthanasia activists are extremely clever and skillful at manipulating public opinion through emotional appeals such as the “hard cases” and through appeals to self-interest. They use the same tools employed by the pro-contraception activists of the 1920s and 1930s (read any issue of Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review to see how heavily she emphasized the “hard cases”).
They are also copying the tactics of the pro-abortion activists whose entire strategy for legalizing abortion was built on an almost exclusive emphasis on the “hard cases” of rape, incest, and life-threatening pregnancies. The euthanasiasts believe everyone should possess the right to do away with himself, and they also believe that society should not be concerned about such self-destructive acts.
This philosophy is not only irresponsible, it is extremely dangerous. Everyone in a society develops, throughout his life, a complex web of relationships. Every person significantly affects many other members of society, often without realizing it.
A society system is roughly analogous to a human body. Its major cities represent organs; the capital is the brain (in the United States, this “brain” often appears to be mentally handicapped); the interstate highways are the arteries, and local roads are the capillaries, carrying nutrients to every cell. We, as individuals, might represent blood cells conveying nutrients to every other cell and organ in the body.
In this setting, euthanasia could be considered a type of leukemia, where individual blood cells start destroying themselves randomly and at an ever-increasing rate.
No human body can live with an acute case of leukemia, and no society can endure if its people destroy themselves at a high enough rate.
All of a healthy body’s cells work together to promote the common good of the body. Similarly, individuals work together to advance the common good of society. Each of us plays a vital part in this complex corpus.
Just as our bodies could not survive if individual cells took it upon themselves to randomly “self-destruct,” our society cannot tolerate the accelerated destruction of its individual members without serious damage.
Euthanasia Is Despair Personified. What deeper expression of despair is there than to kill oneself?
Virtually everyone has, at one time or another, experienced despair so deep that they may even have considered how easy it would be to just “let go” and die. This kind of depression is no joke, and it does no good to simply tell the person to just “Snap out of it!” Quick and easy solutions don’t work — only focused attention and caring and love does.
Deep despair can easily lead to one of the nearly 45,000 suicides the United States now suffers annually — or one of the incredible 1.5 million we have experienced over the past half-century.
Perhaps the most depressing sight is a person totally without hope. This is because, as long as there is a means to overcome one’s troubles, hope remains. When a person has lost all hope, he has lost all faith that he has any control over his situation.
Our society’s emphasis on “choice” and “control” has aggravated this problem terribly. The Culture of Death, the government, and the media tell us that we cannot have control if we cannot have a wide range of choices or avenues of action.
So, we have become conditioned to think that, if we lose options, we have lost control of our lives. And, if we lose control of our lives, we think that those lives are not worth living. We perceive ourselves as less than “fully human” if we cannot have total control all of the time.
This is nonsense. As long as we are living, we can seek to improve our situation. We can actually generate choices ourselves if we learn to cultivate initiative and imagination. What’s more, there are always people, churches, groups, and agencies available to help, whatever our problems may be.
To kill oneself, of course, is to really lose control of the situation.
After all, once again — dead people don’t choose!
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