Culture of death

NotDeadYet posts facts about the myth of assisted suicide.

Especially vulnerable will be the 10 percent of Massachusetts seniors estimated to be abused every year, almost always by family members. A caregiver or heir to an estate can witness a person’s request, pick up the prescription and then administer the lethal dose without worry of investigation — the bill immunizes everyone involved.

The writers say the bill is necessary to prevent “great pain and unrelieved suffering” at the end of life, but official reports from Oregon and Washington show that the top five reasons to request assisted suicide do not include pain, but rather “existential distress” (New England Journal of Medicine) over such issues as dependence on others, loss of abilities and feeling like a burden.

We disabled people reject the prejudice that physical dependence makes our lives undignified

a lot of independent libertarian types always point to the Roman stoic's ideas that suicide should be preferred to sickness.

But in Rome, babies could be thrown away and slaves could be killed for any reason at all. Not to mention girls married off at age 14 by their father's fiat.

Stoic philosophy, like the vague "spiritual but not religious" ideas in modern America, is about personal improvement/perfection.

But religion: especially (but not only) Christianity is about caring for each other too: you need the relationship to the creator to keep your life in balance, but the way you serve the creator is in how you care for others, even if the only thing you can do is pray for them and bear your illness with courage.

I refer back to the essay by Archbishop Chaput that I cites a few days ago: that the destruction of the religious culture and replacing it with "rational" ideas is unable to see beyond the superficial.

without faith in an ultimate meaning, disabled life (or elderly life, or even babies who get in the way of one's career) can be rationally destroyed to benefit a higher goal: follow the money?

But if there is a God, there is a larger picture, where every life has a meaning, and everything happens for a reason.

what is the alternative? modern logical suicide: yet, as Chaput notes: this utilitarian world has consequences:

Blaming these murders (the murder of the disabled in Nazi Germany) on National Socialist race theory would be easy.  And it would be accurate – but only part of the story.  

In reality, the German medical establishment began shifting to a utility-based morality as early as the 1890s.  Doctors, not the Third Reich, first pressed for euthanasia as national policy.  What occurred among medical experts, in the words of one German psychiatrist, was “a change in the concept of humanity,” with its perfectly logical consequences.  Sentimental words about human dignity, unmoored from some authority or purpose higher than ourselves, were just that – words.

I mention Burleigh’s book because several of my friends have children with disabilities.  Watching them parent is a lesson in what the author of the Song of Songs meant when he wrote, “love is strong as death.”  My educator friend, the wife and mother I spoke about earlier, has a son with Down syndrome.  She also has three grandchildren with disabilities ranging from the moderate to the severe.
Her son has an IQ of 43.  His syndrome makes it hard for him to speak.  Sometimes he needs to repeat a sentence three or four times to be understood, even by his family.  He’s more prone to illness.  Simple griefs like getting dumped by a girlfriend lead to inexpressible feelings because he doesn’t have the words to articulate his hurt.  He’s likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease at some point in his life.  Some persons with Down syndrome face it as early as their 30s.  So my friend and her husband live with the knowledge that the son they love may one day be unable to recognize them.

And yet, he has a job.  He has friends.  He’s a distance runner.  He’s a Special Olympian, an opinionated savant of restaurant fare, a master of the mysteries of the rosary, and a sports fanatic.  His life is filled with good things, not sadness.  He’s a daily education in the virtue of patience for his parents, and in what it means to be human for his siblings.  And among his greatest blessings is this:  He will never be alone.  He will always be loved.
None of his family’s behavior is rational in a worldly sense.  Not one of my friends who has a child with disabilities is “rational.”  All of them are unreasonable; all of them are irrational – unless, like Augustine, we believe in order to understand.  

I first got to know about Chaput because he gave talks to the Kateri conferences that my patients attended. He is a Pottawatomie, hence a "minority", something that is rarely mentioned in the news.

As one of our nurses told a consulting physician who advised the family to starve to death a relative with frontal lobe syndrome by pulling her feeding tube: That's the difference between Us Indians and you white folk. We take care of our elders.

This is still true here in the Philippines, which is why Lolo wanted to retire here.

Immigration is the answer to a lot of the moral detrioration caused by greed and the "me-ism" in America.

but that's another story for another time.