Arthur Schafer, director of the Centre for Professional and applied Ethics noted that the sanctity of life was barely mentioned in the latest arguments before Supreme Court hearings on overturning the ban on assisted-suicide.
Apparently that is something worthy of pride.
Think about that. Do we really want to have a discussion about end-of-life before we talk about our view of life? A culture that is based on sanctity of life starts in a different place than one that does not. Do we really want to be proud of removing the idea of sanctity of life from our decisions when we talk about ending life?
Western culture, unlike other cultures around the world, prioritizes life-all life-human and animal. Abusing animals is no less abhorrent than abusing people. There are cultures that think nothing of working animals to death; where children think it’s funny to torture them. Where animal slaughtering is filled with fear and pain. Elsewhere, women are proud to raise sons who will die, martyr themselves, in the name of a cause. Girl fetuses are aborted or murdered at birth. In Patriarchal cultures fathers sacrifice their daughters in the name of restoring honour to a family. Revenge is built into the system-an eye for an eye is literal. There is no concept of justice tempered with mercy because life in and of itself is not respected. Do we really want to be proud of removing the idea of sanctity of life from our decisions when we are talking about assisted-suicide?
According to the Angus Reid poll in November, 37% of the population support the right to die if one feels that his life is meaningless, or he is a burden on one’s family ( how does one measure that?) or has been sentenced to life in jail(that would certainly reduce costs to the taxpayer). Then of course there is late-stage terminal disease and pain. And 33% support physician assisted-suicide in “cases that don’t involve pain or imminent death, but simply wish to die.”
I find that one especially interesting. What if I had convinced doctors when I was deeply depressed to end my life? I could have. I would have missed the marriages of my children and the birth of beautiful grandchildren. I had care from people who believed in the sanctity of life-to live is the prime directive-and we start form there.
This discussion requires us to use proper terminology not euphemisms. We are prioritizing murdering our citizens-because that is what we are doing-over using our intellect and expertise in making life-from beginning to end worthwhile. Professor Schafer has assured us that “the early slippery slope predictions had been empirically refuted and decisively.”
And we said that about abortion, too. I am pro-choice but that does not mean that I look at abortion the way I view the removal of a decayed tooth or inflamed appendix. I know that abortion ends a potential life.I think we can agree on one thing about the beginning of life. A fetus is neither a tumour nor a hang-nail.
Although a fetus is not a person legally, it is “at least a potential and developing human being.” That is the view of English obstetrician R.F.R. Gardner, a Christian. But we moved down the slope from there to Julian Savulescu, a neuroethicist at the University of Oxford who suggested reviving “good eugenics:” the information from the human genome project makes it a moral imperative to produce children with the best genes possible. That gives us not only permission to abort an “imperfect” child, it almost becomes a command. He follows on the footsteps of Joseph Fletcher (1905-1991) an Episcopal priest who taught Christian ethics at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge Massachusetts and Harvard Divinity School. “The world no longer needs all the individuals we are capable of bringing into it-especially those who are unable to compete and are an unhappy burden to others.”He also preaches "The ethical principle is that pregnancy when wanted is a healthy process, pregnancy when not wanted is a disease — in fact, a venereal disease. The truly ethical question is not whether we can justify abortion but whether we can justify compulsory pregnancy."
The truly ethical question we must ask ourselves is what ethic do we want to underpin our decision –making: one that values life because it is life or one that does not? Will we be a culture that reveres all living things or will we slowly slip into a culture that no longer holds any life sacred?
