The darkest of dark ages

For any wishing to see where the West’s culture of assisted death is heading, Canada and the Netherlands have long been the harbingers of things to come. It is well-known that 1 in 20 Canadian deaths now comes at the hands of Canada’s own government. And in the Netherlands, a new boundary has now been crossed: The government has recently reported the first euthanizing of a child between the ages of 1 and 12 who was suffering from a terminal illness.

While the issue of terminal illness is fraught with emotion and references to “unnecessary suffering” carry tremendous emotive power, the deeper issue here is the context in which these actions take place. The West is already listing hard towards a culture of eugenics. IVF and surrogacy cannot in practice be separated from eugenic considerations. And the connection with elective abortion is clear: Iceland’s boast that it has virtually eliminated Down syndrome is a thin euphemism for its elimination of people with Down syndrome. It has decided that the possession of the wrong chromosome renders one unworthy of life.

Given this, it seems highly unlikely that, as chilling as it already is, the euthanizing of children with terminal conditions will be the limit of the practice. The logic of terminating pregnancies involving people with Down syndrome is well-established far beyond Iceland, and, for those who are honest, such killing is predicated not on the welfare of the child but on the challenges and difficulties that such children bring into the lives of their parents—difficulties that a therapeutic world regards as an alien and unacceptable imposition on such. Given that psychological distress is already a criterion for making one a candidate for euthanasia in the Netherlands, it is surely a small move to make psychological distress caused by another who lacks agency—an infant or an elderly person with dementia—as grounds for the termination of life.

Of course, the riposte from the proponents of the killing of incurable kiddies will be to claim that I am engaging in a fallacious “slippery slope” argument. But such an objection lacks any real force. First, if such an argument is fallacious, it should be easy to cite examples—even a single example—of a country that has legitimated state-assisted killing where the practice has become more restrictive (or even remained the same) over time. In practice, it always expands to embrace more and more categories of candidates, often those from the most vulnerable sectors of society: the very young, the very old, the very lonely.

The truth is that the euthanizing of children with terminal illnesses is only plausible as a practice within a culture where other values are already broadly intuitive. Where family ties carry no innate moral responsibility. Where immediate psychological well-being is the essence of the good life. Where moral challenges are easily dispatched as technical problems. And those intuitions are no monopoly of Canada, Iceland, or the Netherlands. They are the default cultural settings of the West as a whole. In this context, countries that present the most extreme actions of today are likely only the avant garde of what will be considered tomorrow to be routine, even socially necessary, actions. And in the process, the weak will become weaker and the vulnerable will become more vulnerable. Infanticide is the wave of the future because it comports so well with the imperative of the therapeutic society.

A new Dark Age is upon us. The therapeutic culture has perverted our culture’s moral imagination. Fail to affirm someone’s gender fantasy by refusing to use their “preferred pronouns” and one can face the loss of livelihood. Suggest that only women menstruate and, like J. K. Rowling, one can receive threats of rape and murder. Fail to back Pride Month, surely the most blatant current form of Western imperialism, and be decried as a hate-filled bigot. We truly live in a world where good is called evil and evil is called good and where the murder of innocents is seen as a sign of moral progress. Indeed, the former Dark Ages perhaps don’t seem quite so dark in comparison.