When The MAID-Men Run The Asylum: The Growing (and Widening) Enthusiasm For Euthanasia

The peace of pod

The Kindly Face of Death

The almost gleeful appropriation of euthanasia for all and sundry in the Western world simply proves that the rejection of the slippery slope arguments by its proponents is a foil. And, as with so many of the post-Christian ethical debates in the West, those championing the spectre of death have continued to put a kindly face upon the grimacing skull of euthanasia, even as they widen its dragnet.

It’s all about the kindness. That’s why across the West we are now using the term “MAID” – medical assistance in dying. After all, state-sanctioned-killing is such a gauche term, don’t you think? And when it comes to ethical debates in the West, aesthetics trumps logics at every turn.

This struck me just this past week as I settled into my seat on a flight down the east coast of Australia back to Sydney after a weekend speaking engagement. I saw a kindly face – a familiar kindly face –  boarded the plane just after I had sat down.

The kindly face of Andrew Denton

Now I’m not familiar to him, but TV personality and leading voice in Australia for euthanasia, Andrew Denton, boarded the plane too and he was once on many an interesting TV show. Older looking than in his prime-time days, with thinning grey locks and round spectacles, he looked the picture of an old, gentle, Hungarian Jewish watch repairer.

Denton, an atheist, is also the public voice of pro-euthanasia organisation Go Gentle – which pretty much is as it says. He leaned into that role after going through the awful death of his father, the author Kit Denton, of Breaker Morant novel fame. He’s a gentle as he looks,  if you can discount the fact that he advocates state-sanctioned killing for the terminally ill. Well, at least I hope that’s as far as he’s willing to take it, because from what we read elsewhere, the terminally ill is now merely one subset of those whom the state is willing to kill,

I glimpsed Denton’s short form over the top of the seats as he settled in. While I have appreciated much of his thinking and writing these past three or four decades, it struck me that this nondescript older man is the gentle face of a brutal and growing industry.

Anonymous to most of the harried parents with too much luggage and one too many crying toddlers, the older greying types heading down to Sydney to see the grandkids, and the young things with headphones and flares, Denton carried the nondescript air of the quietly ageing.

Be that as it may, he  is part of the death-cult infesting the West at the moment. And indeed central in terms of its aesthetic argument. I mean look at him!  He wouldn’t harm a fly! Probably couldn’t. Unless that fly was on its last legs, or its last wings, and had no hope of ever settling one last time on a freshly laid dog poo discovered unscooped on a bucolic walk trail. Even then Denton might be loathe Or so the idea goes.

The Slippery Slope

For as a recent article in The Atlantic journal puts forth in far more serious terms, the much maligned, scorned, and publicly suppressed slippery slope argument that says euthanasia legislation, once enacted, will eventually be offered to all and sundry, actually holds water. A whole lotta water. In fact a Hoover Dam full of water. The Atlantic, which trends on the progressive, liberal side of ethical matters, headlined its piece: Canada Is Killing Itself.  And boy is it! A full five per-cent  – and with a bullet – of Canadians are killed by their fellow Canadians – willingly.

For some reason Canada constantly presents itself as one of the more humane places to live, and indeed prides itself that it is not the USA. And there’s a point to that, right? Lots of guns, but way fewer gunshot deaths. And mountains and snow. And Toronto and Vancouver!  And they have those lovely looking police in funky outfits and horses. And speaking of funky outfits, I am more than partial to the Canadian tuxedo – double denim (triple denim if you count my cap).

Yet all of this kindliness is kinda ironic and kinda sad, because the claim among many conservatives across the world is that the West, unleashed from its Christian moorings, is in a state of suicide. And Canada is Exhibit A!

Yet like Denton, the kindly face of state-sanctioned suicide in Canada insists that what is happening is not a rejection in toto of the appreciation of humans, but in fact peak-individualism.  This is a conversation I had with a ministry leader in Sydney who, when I asked him why euthanasia in places like Canada was being offered left, right and sundry, opined that it was because we had lost sight of the image of God in humans.

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

I demurred. The reason, I suggested – and a reason backed up by the article in The Atlantic -, is that at a base level, humans are individuated at our core, and autonomous moral agents, and that any rejection of “You Do You” (within the boundaries of consent of course), is a violent act. We cannot say “no” to someone else’s desires. We don’t know how to. We don’t have a moral community that will encourage us to. And increasingly we don’t have legislation that will allow us to.

What an irony!  Given the violence that the state is willing to impose on you. So here is what the article states:

At the center of the world’s fastest-growing euthanasia regime is the concept of patient autonomy. Honoring a patient’s wishes is of course a core value in medicine. But here it has become paramount, allowing Canada’s MAID advocates to push for expansion in terms that brook no argument, refracted through the language of equality, access, and compassion. As Canada contends with ever-evolving claims on the right to die, the demand for euthanasia has begun to outstrip the capacity of clinicians to provide it.

Equality, access and compassion. Now in which ethical arguments have we been hearing that? All of them quite frankly. So why would we be surprised to see it pop up here?

The article goes on to say:

MAID now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada—more than Alzheimer’s and diabetes combined—surpassing countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer. It is too soon to call euthanasia a lifestyle option in Canada, but from the outset it has proved a case study in momentum. MAID began as a practice limited to gravely ill patients who were already at the end of life. The law was then expanded to include people who were suffering from serious medical conditions but not facing imminent death. In two years, MAID will be made available to those suffering only from mental illness. Parliament has also recommended granting access to minors.

The New Killing Fields

This is what the West will increasingly look like as it drifts from its framework of Christianity and its commitment to communities whose shared values put a handbrake on excessive, and extreme, expressions of individualism. But as we are finding out, there is no handbrake. To reject someone’s autonomy is to do violence to them. In other words to do actual violence to them and end their life is less violent that the psychological violence of refusing to do so. Strange times we live in.

A couple of years or so ago historian Tom Holland reposted a tweet that summed up his observation that Canada was leading the way in post-Christian ethics.

Across every age bracket for every reason to end a life, the younger cohort was more enthusiastic about euthanasia.  And who will set the cultural tone and legislative framework of Canada (and every other Western nation) in 30 years time? The current crop of 18-30 year olds.

Unless something changes drastically (a revival among the young?) we can expect to see those figures spike. Death is here to not only stay, but to insist upon.

As the article asks: “Has Canada itself gotten what it wanted? Nine years after the legalization of assisted death, Canada’s leaders seem to regard MAID from a strange, almost anthropological remove: as if the future of euthanasia is no more within their control than the laws of physics; as if continued expansion is not a reality the government is choosing so much as conceding.”

It reaches this conclusion:

This is the story of an ideology in motion, of what happens when a nation enshrines a right before reckoning with the totality of its logic. If autonomy in death is sacrosanct, is there anyone who shouldn’t be helped to die?

But that’s the issue in the West, is it not? A right enshrined before the logical end is discussed? Let me put it more baldly than that, those who advocate hard progressive rights in the West KNOW the logical end before it is discussed, and that is why they want to shut down the ethical discussions. The post-Christian ethic is in thrall to death for some sad reason.

There’s a pattern to how this plays out: Suggest the issue and put it out there in the public square, cautiously at first. Then organise a series of puff-pieces in the mainstream media (thank you kindly Andrew Denton), in which antagonists to the cause are seen to be interfering in people’s freedoms and causing the actual harm, for goodness sake!  Then get up some legislation before parliament, and have those same kindly faces tell their stories in a wider setting. Of course you have to ridicule any slippery-slope fears as “dog-whistling” and “clearly outside the guidelines that any sane and humane Parliament or Court would permit”.

Cultural Euthanasia

Nek minnit! You have a country such as Canada in which a full five per cent of the population will end its life by MAID, and the numbers are set to increase dramatically.  And when you look at that retweet from Holland and realise, as he says “Now this really IS post-Christian”, you realise that this was always going to be the way of it.

In fact we’re committing cultural euthanasia. If the “air we breathe” is indeed Christian air, then we are culturally strangling ourselves, and starving people of the very oxygen that highlights how wondrously made in the image of God we are, and how extreme autonomy is not what we were created for. And of course, if MAID ends it all, then what’s to fear. Nothing except a peaceful annihilation.

But since we don’t believe that as Christians, and since our culture, even as it rejected Christianity, still has a pervasive sense of a day of reckoning on the other side of death, then we need to, in turn. reject the MAID-men running the post-Christian asylums of the West. We need to bind up the strongman of demonic madness, or at least we ought to implore God to do so through a gospel renewal, before we become cold, indifferent and crazed.

My own dad died horribly. Perhaps just as horribly as Andrew Denton’s dad died. And there were many a time that, as I watched his suffering and ignominy, that I wished it would end quicker. Prayed for it to end quicker. But held off on any thought of anything else.

Unlike Denton, my relationship with my father was fraught. A bad history there. But here’s what leaning into caring and loving him in those awful months – years in fact- did to me: it made me more merciful, It made me more compassionate. It made me more aware of how God upholds my own faltering weaknesses. It made me more gentle. It made me more kind.

Denton – and Canada – think they are doing gentle and kind. They’re not. They are doing brutal and cruel. They are MAID-men running the post-Christian asylum. My first prayer is that an increasingly number of articles such as The Atlantic‘s most recent piece, will pull us back from the brink. And my second prayer is that a movement of God will see us head off in the other direction. The direction of life.