Freedom to Live

October is “Respect Life Month” for Catholics, and on that theme, First Things published two pieces that characterize the “terrible coarsening” that has arisen in American culture around that issue.

One piece – penned by George Weigel – highlights a constitutional amendment on abortion that is headed for the ballot in Virginia next month. The amendment would “make abortion freely available throughout the third trimester of pregnancy, all the way up to birth; abolish the right of parents to be consulted on, and to consent to, abortions sought by their young daughters; and enable anyone to perform an abortion and to escape legal responsibility for botching an abortion.” To make that verbiage more concrete, Weigel offers the sort of scenario it could result in:

“Say that a girl’s boyfriend illegally obtains abortion pills and encourages the girl to take them without visiting a doctor. The girl voluntarily agrees to do so. It turns out she has an ectopic pregnancy or is beyond the weeks of gestation when the pills are safe for her to take. She dies as a result. No matter how egregious the boyfriend’s conduct, Virginia could not take any adverse action against him.”

This, he suggests, should shake anyone into recognizing how profoundly we’ve lost our moral bearings. But it doesn’t. “Freedom [as] sheer willfulness” is the thing we most want to protect, now – blithely and indiscriminately. Gone is our concern for the freedom that protects our capacity to choose the good. And the result is a “wilderness of lethal confusion” that we’ve made for ourselves to wander around.

Indeed, a “wilderness of lethal confusion” is as good a label as any for the euthanasia issue, too – or so this second piece seems to suggest. But, in the case of euthanasia, the pursuit of “freedom” through more expansive legislation is at risk of becoming even more of a fool’s errand, the author argues.

The piece starts by pointing to one group of people who interestingly oppose physician-assisted suicide: disability rights advocates. “Most people who request [assisted death] services do so because they would rather be killed than be disabled,” the author notes. “When society regards this preference as reasonable (‘Of course you wouldn’t want to live like that!’) and facilitates the choice (‘I will have mercy on you!’), people living with disabilities rightly feel targeted.” To choose to live with a disability, in other words, is to choose to live in a way that’s undignified, degrading; it’s to live in a way that no one would (or should) reasonably choose.

The idea is that we have freedom, then, until we want to go on living with the reduced or needful level of functioning that illness or old age has resulted in – at which point we risk becoming humiliated at best, and a drag on our families and society at worst. Thus the “right to die” is really only a stone’s throw away from being an obligation to die: it’s not just that we don’t have to live with a debilitating illness; we ought not to.

As legislation becomes more and more liberal, the author notes, this obligation is likely to be enforced in the most obvious sense: the terminally ill or the elderly may be coerced into choosing physician-assisted suicide rather than becoming a burden on others, personally or financially. But it will also happen in subtler ways. “Imagine a mother who is terminally ill,” the piece offers. “When assisted death is off the table, she and her loved ones are in the same boat, undergoing a difficult situation together. But when assisted death is offered, she gains the ability to dock the boat and let everyone off. She becomes responsible for everything her family is undergoing related to her illness.” She incurs a moral liability, in other words, that limits her freedom to choose against artificially ending her life. And that’s even if her conscience, or simply her wishes, would prompt her to choose against it.

The problem deepens when taken a bit further downstream. Culturally and socially, the piece argues, we have more sympathy for those who are stuck in the situation that they are, with no exit plan available to them, than we do for those who are choosing their suffering in some way. We take pity more on the person who can’t work because of illness, for instance, than we do on the person who isn’t working simply because he doesn’t want to. What is to prevent an analogous hardening of our sentiments against those sufferers who choose not to cut short their pain? “Come out for one last weekend to say goodbye?” the narrative will go, “Of course! Come by regularly over an indefinite period to cheer you up and listen to you complain about your hardships? No way. You can solve this yourself. I’m not an enabler.”

Our progressive world would have us believe that our march toward “freedom,” our campaign to liberate society from oppression, is an effort that will benefit all. But we shouldn’t be too quick to think so. These issues reveal that the progressive vision doesn’t so much champion care for the oppressed as hatred of oppression; not so much love for the vulnerable as hatred of vulnerability; and not so much compassion for the sick as hatred of disease. In our culture, the idea is that we want to be who we want to be: in control of our own lives; the gods of our own little worlds. And so we eliminate anything – or anyone – that gets in the way of that, whether it’s the babies we don’t want, or the sickness or age that risks debilitating us.

Of course, the pursuit of freedom, power, and utopia in that way is a deluded one. We are not in control of our own lives. We are not the gods of our own world. And it is perilous to think so. Freedom can only truly be had in giving up those delusions. Even if we are, as a culture, a “terrible” way away from admitting so.