Sally Thomas has written a moving and sobering essay in the May issue of First Things, well worth tracking down even if you're not a subscriber. She writes about a former neighbor of hers, a Dutchman who kept in touch in the years after she moved away through occasional letters and homemade Christmas cards. Thomas recently received from him a slender, self-published book, called Life With and Without my Mother, sharing the news of his 96-year-old mother's death.
The book is sort of a journal, in which the son describes her, and his, journey toward her eventual decision to die by the voluntary euthanasia that is legal in Amsterdam. One of the journal entries is: "I feel the doctors need to give her the helping hand she deserves. Why let her suffer? Really, the fun is over for her." The journal goes on to describe the actual procedure, with relatives gathering by her bedside on a Saturday morning, and the doctor administering the "process implementation."
Thomas ends the essay with these thoughts:
Again I think of my own friend, of everything I have ever known about him: a kind neighbor, a loving father, a friend who keeps faith with people who move away. I think of the Christmas cards. I think of the tree in the yard. And I cannot square all that with this book which even now is propped beside me on my desk.
But of course, in truth, I can square this equation. I can square it by acknowledging that even the good are fallen and all of us carry death in our hearts. I can square it by acknowledging that the process of extrapolation works both ways: If I can extrapolate cultural suicide from one man in a café, then I can also extrapolate, from the fact of a culture of death, the easy transformation of any decent, law-abiding citizen into a murderer, into a murderer’s willing accomplice. If you build it, they will come, goes the hokey-mystical mantra in the movie Field of Dreams. Similarly, if you legalize it, it will happen.
Safe, legal, and rare. Isn’t that how the abortion chant goes? In reality, as a culture, Americans have allowed abortion to become the standard medical treatment for children prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome. Ninety percent of such children are aborted: That’s how heroic our moral struggle has been. That’s how often a loving mother is persuaded that her only merciful option is to assent to the death of her child. It’s a tragic fact of the human mind that, once it begins to entertain a proposition, however outrageous, the proposition becomes not a mere proposition but a sane and rational course of action.
No, make that the sane and rational course of action. From might to may to must: zero to sixty in a cultural instant. In the slipstream, even now, doctors in Amsterdam are packing up their things, and families are filing out of darkened bedrooms into the barren light of a Saturday morning.
