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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
March 21, 2010
Euthanizing debate
It is a well-known fact that half of the medical costs for the average person are accrued in the last six months of his life."Well-known" in this case means "oft-repeated," and I do not take the truth of this assertion for granted. It seems plausible, but then, many things that seem plausible are untrue; and even where arguably true, a plain fact often masks a paradox. As I have become more aware over time, "statistics" of this sort are thrown around in debates, or pseudo-debates, over social policy, with more-or-less indifference to their origin or veracity. The idea is to make an end run around opposition arguments. If the "statistic" is convenient to the prejudices of the prevailing party, it will not be challenged -- "how dare you question," for example, even the implausible numbers given in propaganda about "violence against women." If they are contradicted by actual research, that research will be ignored, or stigmatized. In this case, the (pseudo) debate is over euthanasia. The matter is coming to a head through a private member's bill before the House of Commons by Francine Lalonde of the Bloc Québécois: a revision of the bill she first proposed in 2005. She is herself known to be wrestling with cancer; and the argument for "euthanasia" (the meaning of this euphemism is itself often twisted) depends partly on our natural sympathy for people who are in great pain. Or, potentially in pain. "Pain" is itself hardly a simple concept. The word covers a wide range of conditions, from acute physical pain, with known external symptoms, to the vaguest internalized emotional stress. It was the wisdom of the law until quite recently to be correspondingly specific about the meanings of words. This wisdom is progressively lost as we allow "hard cases to make bad law." And sympathy is itself something to look into. It tends to present itself as pure and altruistic when it is making demands. "Euthanasia" is presented as a means to relieve the suffering of others. At the back of one's mind, however, is the notion that, "I might be in that situation some day, or something like it, and if that happens, I will want the option of an easy way out." But then there are more sordid considerations, which because they are sordid are merely hinted, rather than elaborately spelled out. For thanks to contraception and abortion, we now have a steeply aging population. One evil often leads to another, and the idea that we could balance the books again -- make up for the relative shortage of the young and taxable by lopping off the oldies for whom they must pay -- presents itself from the shadows. Many evils combined to produce that calculation. For instance, the demographic crisis created by the elimination of "unwanted children" is compounded by the fiscal crisis created by the knowing mismanagement of pension funds by the state. The money was not invested, as it would have been under private insurance schemes, but instead used in current accounts to pay the passing expenses of the day, including compounding interest on other debt. We should never have needed the ever-growing tax-base that we no longer have. Ideas have consequences. Ponzi schemes have consequences. Shopping when you should be saving has consequences that, in the end, are not only fiscal. And there is still worse disorder. I attended a funeral earlier this week for the mother of an old friend. That friend, and his wife, are by current standards very unusual people. They kept their aging parents at home; they attended personally to their needs, as well as to the needs of adopted children, despite very busy professional lives. They are so old-fashioned that they do not even boast about what they had and have been doing -- out of a love that is non-negotiable. Somewhere in the course of the social revolution that has been effected since the 1960s, the category of non-negotiable love has been misplaced. And this, in turn, touches upon public attitudes towards euthanasia. The old have become a problem where they were once a resource -- that included the moral resource they provide when we must care for them in their last season of adversity. We, in our turn, face an old age for which we are not prepared, because we have not had the opportunity to "rehearse" it, through our own care for the aged. All have alike been barbarized by this development, which has made life cheap. The old, no longer confident that they are loved, themselves despair, from being a nuisance to others. And even the young, faced with adversity in a world that is friendless, take the message that life is cheap. These things all precede the largest consideration: the loss of that religious faith that told us precisely why life is not cheap. And the loss, with this, of the moral teaching that could distinguish between refusing questionable and highly artificial means to extend life, and what constitutes the grievous mortal sins of suicide and "assisted suicide," which is murder. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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