Bruce
Bawer is the author of While Europe Slept, Surrender,
and The Victims' Revolution. His novel The Alhambra
was published in 2017.
Back
in 2014 I wrote here about a healthy two-year-old giraffe
named Marius, who, amid much controversy, was euthanized by
the Copenhagen Zoo to make room for “a genetically more
valuable giraffe,” as the zoo’s scientific director
rather indelicately put it. An international zoo official
supported his decision, saying that critics (most of them,
apparently, American) should think less about Marius and more
about “the bigger picture.” As I commented at
the time, these two zoo folk weren’t – aren’t
– alone; they belong to a contemporary breed of people,
particularly thick on the ground in northern Europe, who think
this way not just about animals but, yes, about human beings.
These
“bigger picture” types would be quick to deny
that there’s anything morally dubious about their position.
On the contrary, as I wrote in my 2014 piece, they’re
“certain that they are noble and good. They believe
in the cycle of life. They believe in quality of life. They
just don’t happen to believe in the individual life.”
Often, I added, they contrast themselves to “sentimentalists”
– many of them, yes, Americans – “who don’t
grasp that every individual life is only part of a larger
design, a ‘bigger picture,’ and should be extinguished
the moment it becomes burdensome or inconvenient.” I
suggested that “there exists a certain continuity between
this way of thinking and that which made possible the horrors
of the Final Solution.”
In
2014, “active euthanasia,” which means administering
a lethal drug, was allowed in Belgium, the Netherlands, and
Luxembourg. Period. When I revisited the topic in a 2018 article,
it was also permitted in Colombia and Canada. India allowed
“passive euthanasia,” i.e. withholding artificial
life support, while other jurisdictions – Switzerland,
Germany, South Korea, Japan, and several U.S. states –
prohibited euthanasia per se but allowed “physician-assisted
suicide.”
On
August 18 of this year, I was shocked to read in the New
York Times that a friend of mine, the writer Norah Vincent,
had died on July 6 at age 53. After making some inquiries,
I discovered that her death had taken place at a Swiss institution
specializing in assisted suicide. Norah, whom I’ve already
written about at length, wasn’t physically ill or in
physical pain when she chose to die; she doesn’t even
seem to have been racked by deep depression. In her final
days she was able to laugh and joke; in the very last picture
of her, taken the day before her death, she has a big smile
on her face.
But
then perhaps she was in such good spirits precisely because
she knew she was about to go. Norah had long been fascinated
by death. In her last moments she thought she was embarking
on a great adventure. Those of us who can’t relate to
such feelings – who find them more terrifying than the
scariest movie ever – are very, very lucky.
After
my article about Norah’s death appeared, I received
a Facebook message from a stranger in the Netherlands whose
mother had chosen to be euthanized when she was dying of cancer.
This woman felt that I’d been too critical of assisted
suicide. In fact I’d tried to focus my piece on Norah
and not on my own views. I’ve had beloved pets “put
down” or “put to sleep,” as they say, when
they were dying and in pain. I can’t criticize human
beings who, under such circumstances, want the same option
for themselves.
But
what about Norah’s case? I admitted to this woman that
I was troubled by Norah’s choice – but I would
never condemn her for it, or condemn Norah’s and my
mutual friend who had traveled to Switzerland with her to
be present at the end. How could I dare to? Yes, I wrote,
“the idea of it still chafes against ideas about the
sacredness of life that I was brought up with. As someone
who’s had loved ones with serious psychiatric problems,
I can’t help feeling that with better psychiatric care
Norah might still be alive, and happy.” Then again,
I hadn’t been in touch with Norah for many years; meanwhile
our mutual friend, a brilliant, good, and sensitive woman,
had been extremely close to her, and she’d concluded
that Norah was living with an increasingly malignant psychic
demon that would never let her go.
No,
I wouldn’t ever criticize Norah or our mutual friend.
But the people who agitate to legalize “assisted suicide”?
The people whose chosen profession it is to “assist”
at these suicides, and then go home to have dinner with their
loved ones? And the people, some of them doctors and psychiatrists,
who’ve even been known to suggest assisted suicide as
an option to people in need of medical or psychiatric care?
Them, I’ll criticize.
In
Norway, where I live, assisted suicide is still illegal. But
“death panels” are a reality, with certain expensive
life-or-death treatments being routinely denied on account
of cost. Over the years there have been debates about the
morality of further rationing medical procedures. Every now
and then there’s an op-ed or TV debate on the question:
“How much is an extra year of life worth?” Now,
the reason why northern European welfare states instituted
sky-high tax rates in the first place was so that there would
never have to be such debates. Then Norway started pouring
millions of dollars every year into the coffers of the UN
and other pernicious international organizations as well as
into the pockets of Third World dictators. Then there are
the ever-growing number of immigrants who arrive at Oslo airport
with their hands out, and the tons of cash the government
gives to mosques run by hate preachers. If the people who
wrote government budgets had their priorities in order, there
wouldn’t be a need for debates about the cost of health
care.
What
these debates remind us is that the ultimate danger of permitting
euthanasia and assisted suicide is that a choice that’s
now being made by patients may sooner or later be made by
government officials or hospital authorities against the will
of patients. On the road to that hell, moreover, there’s
a point beyond which people who aren’t as fiercely determined
to die as Norah was are cajoled into doing so. Nor is it unreasonable
to worry that a greater legitimization of suicide will make
it look attractive to people who otherwise would never have
contemplated it. (If this sounds unlikely, look at the countless
young people who in the last few years have been seduced by
the transgenderism trend.)
No
country on earth, perhaps, has traveled further down this
road than Canada, which has allowed assisted suicide since
2016. Last year, according to an October 11 article by Rupa
Subramanya, assisted suicide accounted for more than 3% of
deaths in Canada, and nearly 5% in Quebec and British Columbia.
(“Progressive Vancouver Island,” Subramanya writes,
“is unofficially known as the ‘assisted-death
capital of the world.’”) More and more Canadians
under age 45 are choosing to die in this fashion, and doctors
have increasingly broadened the range of people whom they
consider acceptable candidates for death. Next year, Canada’s
federal government “is scheduled to expand the pool
of eligible suicide-seekers to include the mentally ill and
‘mature minors.’” Subramanya recounts the
alarming story of an Ontario woman, Margaret Marsilla, who
discovered a few weeks ago that her 23-year-old son, Kiano
Vafaeian, blind in one eye owing to diabetes, had scheduled
a September 22 appointment with a doctor named Joshua Tepper
to end his life. When Marsilla went public with the details,
Dr. Tepper canceled the appointment.
A
Toronto oncologist named Ellen Warner told Subramanya that,
as “an old-fashioned Hippocratic Oath kind of doctor,”
she’s “100 percent against” physician-assisted
suicide. Ponder that for a moment: “old-fashioned Hippocratic
Oath kind of doctor.” The Hippocratic Oath was good
enough for Hippocrates (born about 460 B.C.) and it was good
enough for my father and his entire generation of doctors;
but now it’s “old-fashioned.” Indeed, Subramanya
spoke with another physician, British Columbia psychiatrist
Derryck Smith, who views the rise in Canadian deaths from
assisted suicide as a positive development and who told Subramanya
that he “never took the Hippocratic Oath . . .because
he thought it was ‘archaic.’”
Subramanya
also quotes Canadians whose suicide plans are based at least
in part on financial considerations. Assisted suicide, one
of them told her, “is the new society safety net”;
another said that her daughter had told her that, given their
budget problems, they wouldn’t be able to get by and
would have to apply for assisted suicide.
The
people applying to die aren’t the only ones who are
thinking about money, of course. For government officials
in Canada, as for their counterparts in other countries, assisted
suicide is a splendid way to reduce health-care costs. It’s
thrifty. It’s green. It helps, as Ebenezer Scrooge might
put it, to “reduce the surplus population.” And
even as the elites increasingly encourage the rabble to throw
in the towel, those elites themselves will continue to fly
halfway around the world, if necessary, to get the best treatment
for their own ailments. Last month, Canadian newspapers reported
a story that wasn’t the first – and won’t
be the last – of its kind: a veteran who’d applied
to Veterans Affairs for treatment for PTSD and a traumatic
brain injury was instead offered the option of assisted death.
One
critic of assisted suicide, Norwegian author Jan Grue, wrote
a novel called Det blir ikke bedre (It Won’t
Get Better, 2016) in which he imagines a future Norway that
aims to be “the best of all possible societies.”
To that end, the state incentivizes unhappy people to avail
themselves of the opportunity to be put to sleep. The utilitarian
mentality that is widespread in countries like Norway, Grue
warned in an interview, can reinforce the notion “that
there are many lives that are not worth living.” Making
the opposite argument was the movie Me Before You,
also from 2016 (and based on a 2012 novel by Jojo Boyes),
in which Will (Sam Claflin), an athletic banker, is rendered
quadraplegic by an accident. When his young carer, Louisa
(Emilia Clarke), learns that he intends to undergo assisted
suicide, she tries to bring meaning to his life and change
his mind. They fall in love – but Will goes ahead with
his plans nonetheless, because, we’re meant to understand,
in the long run she’ll be better off without him.
As
Jan Grue has commented, this film’s message is “that
disabled people should die so other people can be grateful
to be alive.” Is this really the direction in which
the Western world wants to go? Let’s hope Me Before
You’s overwhelmingly glowing audience reviews on
Rotten Tomatoes (“most amazing film ever,” “loved
it,” “I cried,” etc.) are merely reflective
of the callow tastes of a certain kind of filmgoer, presumably
young, dumb, and female, and not representative of the broader
public’s real view of the disposability of physically
imperfect human beings. In any event, at a time when more
and more Americans – including mainstream political
leaders – apparently support abortion right up to the
moment of birth, I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising
that many of the same people consider adults to be disposable
as well.
by
Bruce Bawer:
Stop
Saying LGBT
Paul
Auster: Man in the Dark
Karl
Ove Knaaugaard's The Morning Star
Gender
Narcissism
History of World's Most Liberal City
Global Warning: An Unsettled Science
