When rights talk leads to death

Several years ago, Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon offered the persuasive argument that America has embraced what she calls “rights talk.”  The assertion of rights is now the standard way to effect social change or, in the case of individuals, to have your own way.  “Rights talk” is what remains when a cultural consensus about right and wrong evaporates.

Fast-forward and rights talk is, if anything, even more ingrained in the American character.  Battles over competing and conflicting assertions of rights now emerge over some of the hottest and most contentious issues of the day. When we have run out of other arguments, all we have left is to assert that what we demand is, after all, only our right.

Is there an end-game to all this? That question reminds me of an argument that once appeared in Britain. Writing in The Guardian (London), Simon Jenkins argues that the right to end one’s life on one’s own terms is basic to humanity, and that only “religious primitivism” stands in the way of cultural acceptance and legal approval for assisted suicide—an issue that is headline news in Britain right now.

“There cannot be a human freedom so personal as ordering the circumstances of one’s death,” Jenkins argues. “Yet Britain is instinctively collectivist, enveloped in prejudice, religion, taboo and prohibition.”

Britain decriminalized suicide in 1961, but it remains a crime to assist another to commit suicide. Simon Jenkins finds this intolerable. “Only the most warped collectivist could argue that individuals must be kept alive against their will,” he insists.

In order to make his case, Jenkins tells the story of Daniel James, a 23-year-old rugby player whose parents took him to Switzerland in order to assist his suicide. James had been seriously injured and no longer wanted to live in his state of incapacity. He demanded assisted suicide, but this is illegal in Britain. Giving him what he demanded, his parents took him to Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.

Jenkins admits that the young man did not have a terminal disease and that “his mental state was clear.” Nevertheless, he expressed the desire to die. Then comes this sentence: “He asserted his desire to do something perfectly legal, to take his own life, but was impeded by his disability from doing so. His parents freed him from that impediment. To prosecute them would be an outrage.”

The young man wanted to die, but his condition “was certainly not terminal.” In other words, he was not satisfied with his physical condition, but he was not dying. Not until his parents assisted his suicide, that is.

Simon Jenkins writes of young Daniel James wanting “to do something perfectly legal.” That is a cold and breathtakingly callous way of talking about suicide. Was Jenkins celebrating suicide as an ultimate act of self-expression and the exercise of personal rights?  It would seem hard for him to escape this conclusion. If so, he is a prophet of the Culture of Death.

We also have to face reports from medical insiders who tell us that many deaths in hospitals and nursing homes are “assisted.” A lack of candor often hides the brutal truth.

So “death by killing” is to be understood as a great cultural achievement? Who decides who shall live and who shall die? When is enough, enough? Are economic concerns taken into account? Who gains by the death? What does this say about how we value life? Who gave humanity this authority?

Activists and advocates for assisted suicide or euthanasia push policy proposals, but often end up demanding that courts and judges do the work of legalizing the “right” to assisted suicide. And yet, it is becoming more evident that many politicians intend to push the agenda. Just look across America’s northern border and see how fast the Culture of Death is advancing in Canada.

Rights talk divorced from a basic structure of right and wrong leads to disaster. If we redefine medical ethics to approve killing, then killing we shall have.