Euthanasia’s Parallel to Abortion

Nancy was a severely disabled girl of 12 years old. She was not dying, but she required constant care and was in constant severe pain. In short, Nancy was euthanized because she was disabled, which is the same reason that a large number of unborn children are aborted. Now, it may be that in very rare cases, it might be permissible to end someone’s suffering if they are in constant severe pain and there is no way to alleviate it, and no hope is in sight of curing them. I’m not writing this to examine the ethics of euthanasia, in and of itself. But the language used, like in the abortion debate, can obfuscate what really matters in the issue.

One glaring example is that in the article linked above, Charlotte said “my daughter is no longer my daughter, she is now merely just a shell.” She goes on to say, “The light from her eyes is now gone and is replaced with fear and a longing to be at peace.” This second statement contradicts her first. If she is just a shell (in other words, a body with no soul, or no “animating factor”), then she wouldn’t have longing or fear in her eyes. A corpse cannot feel pain, nor could it communicate (verbally or non-verbally) if it did have physical pain or discomfort. So her child was not merely a shell. She is dehumanizing her child based on “the light” (whatever she means by that) being gone.

Another example of obfuscating the moral issue is when a parent of a severely disabled child (or adult, or elderly person) claims they are putting the person to death for them, but are really putting the other person to death because they are too much of a burden (sometimes it’s even explicitly stated that the person in question will be too much of a burden). In this specific case, Charlotte was very distressed (and rightly so) by her child’s situation. I don’t doubt that in this specific case, she did what she believed was best for her child, although her claim that she desired her child to be free from pain is undermined by the painful way Nancy died. When we kill a death row inmate, we don’t starve them. We give them a lethal injection. However, in many circumstances when a child has a severe deformity, they are allowed to be put to death. I am reminded of one such case in the United States in 1984, in which a baby (nicknamed Baby Doe by the media) was born with Down syndrome and tracheoesophageal fistula, and the obstetrician recommended the family not pursue treatment, since there was only a 50% chance of the baby surviving the surgical repair, and the prospects of the child were bleak if he did survive surgery. The family decided not to pursue treatment, but their family doctor opposed this plan and took them to court to try and save the child. The court ruled in favor of the family and the child died of starvation. This decision was such a breach of ethics that it caused the United States to pass the Baby Doe Law, in which they proclaimed that assessments of a baby’s quality of life are not valid reasons to withhold basic care (e.g. food and water).

The problem with reasoning like this is once you start down the path of determining in which situation one should be allowed to die, even against one’s expressly stated wishes, there is no end to where it could end up. Once you open that door, it’s a small step to finding other, less severe disabilities that you deem not worth living, euthanizing people who have those disabilities against their wishes.

Of course, euthanizing disabled people because they are disabled does not sit right with disabled persons advocates. It’s essentially a case of non-disabled people making determinations about which disabilities are worth living with and making determinations about who lives and who dies based on those determinations. Even more sickening is the fact that leftist sites are praising the decision. Salon called it “powerful” (and let’s be honest, it is a decision a powerful person makes over the life of a powerless person). Yahoo News calls it a fight to let her daughter “die in peace.” These cheerleaders fail to consider how acceptance of “euthanasia” affects the broader disabled communities; if killing becomes acceptable, it dramatically reduces the incentive to find cures.

The parallel here should be pretty obvious. Killing a child outside the womb for reasons of severe deformity is no different than killing a child inside the womb for that same deformity. But now, even though the child is outside the womb and is uncontroversially considered a person, they are still allowed to be killed for reasons of deformity. This indicates that society has deemed persons with that deformity as not true persons, because one can be killed simply for having that deformity. And if an unborn child has a deformity that they are killed for (e.g. Down syndrome), then what we are really saying is that it is better to be killed than to have to go throughout life with certain disabilities, even Down syndrome, which is not seen as a debilitating disability, and people with Down syndrome grow up to lead productive lives and are some of the happiest and kindest people you’ll ever meet. But society has deemed their lives not worth living because they allow us to kill them while still in the womb.

Arguments about “quality of life” (and related arguments about “drains on society”) are utilitarian arguments that have no place in a civilized society. Dying with dignity is about how one faces death, not about how one dies. Everyone must die — there is no dignity in ending your life early to avoid having to go through it.