Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Hi everybody. Welcome along to another episode of the Dispatchers podcast. My name is Brendan Malone. It is great to be back with you again. And today we're going to be talking about the issue of euthanasia. And not really so much the issue of euthanasia, but the serious social, societal, cultural implications of legalised euthanasia. So what happens in a culture, in a society where you have legalised the act, the, the practice of ending lives, that's euthanasia, or helping someone to end their own life, that's assisted suicide.
[00:00:37] What happens beyond the ideological confines which really we are trapped by and which I think cause us to think of this issue in the wrong way? We're far too myopic, we're far too narrow. We think solely with the mind of the liberal ideology which says you are an autonomous self choosing individual, so why shouldn't you as an autonomous self choosing individual? And by the way, I should say here, this is not at all any form of opposition to legitimate human freedoms. So the opposite of liberalism is not communism or collectivism where you don't recognise the individual and you don't see that they might have legitimate individual human freedoms. No, no, no, there are legitimate freedoms that human persons should be free to exercise within a.
[00:01:29] But what liberalism does is it goes a whole other step and it says that the human person is basically, it creates a faulty anthropology and it says that the human person is an autonomous self choosing individual. And the human society that we live in should be built on the idea that we are all autonomous self reasoning individuals and that society exists, and particularly governments and laws and things like that they exist to maximize the freedoms of those autonomous self choosing individuals. And they only exist because of those autonomous self choosing individuals all coming together and agreeing. So this is the whole social contract theory.
[00:02:08] And basically, in a nutshell, what happens when you have something like euthanasia, when you've been formed and conditioned your entire life by a culture, by a society that has told you that you are primarily an autonomous self choosing individual and that the fundamental unit of society is the autonomous self choosing individual. What happens to the concept of community, to the concept of communal responsibility, to the concept of how in actual fact we are not autonomous. The reality is that we are individuals, but we are communal by nature and our existence is inherently communal. Obviously we don't bring ourselves into existence. The first and most important of all communities, the family are they bring you into existence. You can't survive without them. When you are very young or when you are frail and elderly, the community of the Family and the community at large must actually give themselves to you. So you are not autonomous and you cannot actually flourish as a human person without community. You need to know at least one other person as friend, otherwise you can never really fully know what it is to be authentically human and to be who you truly are. Whether that's the challenge and testing of friendship, whether that's the way in which a friend will draw you out of yourself and help you discover things about yourself that you didn't even realize, or fundamentally the call to self giving love, which requires an other so someone else for you to love, to self give, to make acts of self sacrifice for their good.
[00:03:39] And so basically we're living in a society that's abandoned all of that and just views itself through the liberal lens, view society in that way, views the individual in that way, and then it starts acting and creating laws according to this ideology. And euthanasia, legalized euthanasia and legalised assisted suicide are very clear examples of this kind of ideology then manifesting itself in our laws and legislation. And what we're going to do today is we're going to focus on a story. This is a rather long winded introduction, a roundabout way of getting to the point here, and is I want to actually talk about an incident.
[00:04:19] The story itself and the people involved in what's happened here will become apparent in just a second when I read to you the opening paragraphs from a newly published BBC news article about this euthanasia death.
[00:04:33] But then more importantly, what I want to do is I want to focus in on not just the issue of euthanasia. I really want to focus in, like I said earlier, on the implications of, of how our liberal ideology is causing us to become intellectually, emotionally and morally stunted.
[00:04:53] We are effectively like living in a society that tells you that the autonomous self choosing individual is the most important. It's the fundamental unit of society, not the family and certainly not the community.
[00:05:05] And this idea that you should view yourself and legislation, everything should be geared around that idea, you know, satisfying as many of your desires as possible, possible.
[00:05:14] Then what starts to happen is like you start to find yourself living in a society of indifference. People become indifferent to each other because they have been conditioned to think primarily about themselves and not the other. And certainly not how their actions or the satisfaction of their desires and wants could impact the wider community. And this story is a prime example of this.
[00:05:40] And not only do you see in the reactions to this particular story, which, yes, I'm going to get to and introduce you to in just a moment. Do you see the fact that people are not recognizing this, but you see the way that indifference is playing out.
[00:05:53] People are not recognizing the gravity of what legalized euthanasia actually means. It doesn't simply mean, as the proponents claim, an autonomous self choosing individual will make a choice and, and it's up to them and it's only about them.
[00:06:09] That's not what it means at all.
[00:06:11] The entire community is affected when you legalise and allow and participate in as a state the practice of euthanizing people with lethal injections.
[00:06:24] And not just that, but there is a growing indifference in our culture to the suffering of people. There's a growing indifference to the vulnerable who are put at risk. And in this case there is a very clear example of suffering on the part of one of the people involved in the story.
[00:06:40] And the comments reveal a great tragedy of indifference.
[00:06:44] A great and I think very ugly spectre of indifference.
[00:06:50] So let me read to you from this BBC article early one morning in June. And by the way, this article starts, before the BBC even starts with that opening sentence, there is a warning. It says some people might find this article upsetting. And it's really interesting. I always find that juxtaposition intriguing because there is an ironic paradox that's being highlighted here.
[00:07:15] There is something here that our own actions are showing us. They're pointing to the darkness, they're pointing to the deficiency. And so what I mean by that is that whenever a story about euthanasia or assisted suicide is published, you get these kind of warnings. Like some people might find this article upsetting or consistently you get to the bottom of the article and you will discover that they have phone numbers or website addresses, contact details for suicide, anti suicide helplines.
[00:07:45] The fact that that juxtaposition exists is people instinctively recognizing and their actions pointing to the truth that we are not just autonomous self choosing individuals, that even the actions of totally random strangers, people I do not know from Adam, their actions flow out into the community and they have a bearing on all of us. And the fact that we've legalized this action also has to come with warnings.
[00:08:18] Why? Because there are vulnerable people who are also affected. Even though we blindly try and insist that it's just about the autonomous self choosing individuals. But let me carry on with this article. Early one morning in June 2024.
[00:08:31] So this is what two years ago, Bas pulled up next to his parents camper van parked on a sunny Marina in the north of the Netherlands. His father and mother, Jan and Els and had spent most of their married life on water. Now in their 70s, they could no longer manage a houseboat. Their camper van, positioned close to the yachts and dinghies, was the next best thing. Jan and Els got into their son's car. Bas started the engine. This would be the final time he drove his parents anywhere. For Jan and Els, this journey to the local hospice would be their last.
[00:09:09] At 10:30 that morning, they would be administered lethal medication. In actual fact it's not medication because it's not medicating anything, is it? It's a lethal dosage by doctors. And they would die together in what is known in the Netherlands as duo euthanasia. It's legal and it's rare, but every year more Dutch people choose to end their lives this way. So in other words you have people multiple, like more than one person. They are committing an act of assisted suicide or euthanasia. They're being euthanized together.
[00:09:40] Three days before their fatal appointment at the hospice, Jan and Els gave an interview to the BBC. In their camper van, Jan was living with continual pain. The legacy of years hauling cargo on the Netherlands Inland Waterways.
[00:09:54] ALS had been diagnosed with dementia. Their story was picked up and commented on around the world.
[00:10:02] Now more than two years on, the couple's only child describes trying to persuade his mother and father to delay their deaths while supporting their decision to stop living.
[00:10:16] He reveals the emotional burden his parents decision placed on him and the profound loneliness that followed.
[00:10:26] And as you can imagine, the article unfolds from there. It is about the son and the impact of what this meant for him. The headline of the article is My parents chose to die together and I was left to grieve alone.
[00:10:43] And I look at this and I see in this, this act I see something truly vile and anti human.
[00:10:52] A mother and a father who choose to commit and act, engage in a suicide pact.
[00:11:01] And neither of them has really fully unified with and responded to I think in the correct way to that communal obligation that comes with being a parent.
[00:11:17] They see themselves as autonomous, self choosing individuals and they see themselves as husband and wife as a unit.
[00:11:25] But their son, well that's just his life. He's separate, he's not. There is no community in this act.
[00:11:33] They don't recognize how their action or if they do, they don't care enough to actually stop what they're doing and consider what it means for their son that both of his parents would just top themselves in this way and then leave him alone.
[00:11:55] There's no other way to describe this, but to just be frank and honest, this is a level of selfishness that's hard to really sort of capture in words, I think, and to probably even wrap your head around.
[00:12:09] There's something, like I said, dehumanised, anti human in all of this.
[00:12:14] And so that's what the story's about. It's about the reality of euthanasia playing out in the community. So first of all the community, the family, and then here it is sort of playing out now in the wider community.
[00:12:25] And when the BBC publishes an article about this, my parents chose to die together and I was left to grieve alone. And then they post this on their Facebook page and this was posted there at the time of recording this, about 17 or 18 hours ago.
[00:12:43] The comments are heartbreaking.
[00:12:47] Let me just read to you some of these comments and these reactions. They did it before things got bad and they were not stupid forward planning before things got worse. Feel for the son, but he has to be pleased as his parents didn't suffer. And for him to watch the horror of both illnesses, not pleasant.
[00:13:09] That's again, that's the indifference. They're indifferent to the son.
[00:13:14] There's probably fear in that comment too.
[00:13:16] People project, sorry, their own fears into these moments.
[00:13:20] I'm afraid of what death and dying will mean for me. I'm afraid of what the end will mean for me, how that will all play out.
[00:13:28] But this idea that somehow it's better for the son not to have to go through this on that journey with death and the difficulty of dying.
[00:13:37] We've been doing this from the very beginning, by the way. It's only really in modern times when we have the least excuse for this.
[00:13:43] We now have the most amazing life saving technologies and when they cannot come to the party, we now have a level of palliative care, end of life care and pain relief that we've never known before in human history. We have the least excuse of any generation to actually want, let alone legalise, euthanasia and assisted suicide. Yet we are just clamoring for more and more of it.
[00:14:07] And I think a big factor in this is, is the Freudian psychology which burdens us.
[00:14:14] We believe ourselves to be psychological beings alone. This is how Philip Reiff, the great scholar of Freud, talked about it. He said, before Freud we recognized that we were religious man. After Freud we became psychological man.
[00:14:34] And a religious man is born to be saved. He said, psychological man is born to be pleased.
[00:14:40] And so we think that the meaning of life is our own satisfaction and our own Happiness, it's not, but we're told that constantly.
[00:14:48] And so what happens is we obsess on the pleasure principle. We seek that pleasure and that self gratification, that happiness in sometimes small, simple ways, sometimes very big and hedonistic and very destructive ways.
[00:15:01] And then we struggle with something like suffering.
[00:15:04] And we are burdened by this now and we are confused and we think that our personal happiness must be satisfied at all times, otherwise there's a major catastrophe. If our personal happiness, if we're not being satisfied, then there is a catastrophe. That's how we generally tend to think.
[00:15:20] Here's another one. Every human being and animal should have the right to die with dignity and without extended and debilitating suffering.
[00:15:30] Well, what do you mean? Every being human and animal like an animal? Animals don't have rights.
[00:15:38] And rights correspond with obviously the fact that we are moral beings, that we have a capacity for intellect and free will.
[00:15:51] Animals don't have that. They don't exist in that same way. So it is more correct when we talk about treating animals in a way that is good, like, for example, not being cruel to animals, which we should never be. It's more correct to talk about animal welfare. So there's a. There's a what? And what that does is it orientates the action where it rightly belongs. We are moral beings. We have a moral obligation not to be cruel, even to animals. Right?
[00:16:16] And so it's about their welfare, but it's about our moral obligations. But when we talk about human persons, they do have rights.
[00:16:24] So they are different from human persons. There are human rights, but not animal rights. They're two different things. Even though we use that framing often, animal rights. We really should talk about animal welfare because it reminds us where their welfare, the source of their welfare is us and how we treat them.
[00:16:41] But you couldn't have animals, for example, fighting each other over the fact that, you know, you've got to stop, you know, a pack of wolves or whatever, you know, it's my right to have my family, you keep eating my children, you know, one of the other wolves in the pack, just, you know, it's not a coherent position.
[00:16:56] But what does it mean to die with dignity? So the assumption here, the flaw here is that you are dying with dignity if you don't experience suffering, which is. That's not correct. That is just not correct.
[00:17:11] And also, dignity is not really the right measure because the reality is that dying isn't one of those dignified acts. It just isn't.
[00:17:20] Dying is a challenging. It's a difficult. It's a messy business.
[00:17:25] You effectively regress back to a stage in life where you started from. But it's not the right measure. And I know it's not the right measure because a young infant shares many of the same characteristics as an older person or a person with an illness or disability who is dying.
[00:17:44] Their lack of control, their lack of the ability to actually explain to people what's really going on. Their lack of movement, their lack of the ability to, you know, to go to the shops or to do simple things for themselves.
[00:17:56] The fact that they often can't even control their bowels, things like this.
[00:18:01] But we don't look at a young infant in that state and say, oh, there's no dignity there. They'd be better off dead.
[00:18:08] So why should we be looking at elderly people and, or people with illnesses or terminal illnesses and treating them in the same way? Because dignity is the wrong measure. It's the wrong measure.
[00:18:20] The question is not will I have a dignified death? Because the reality is there is no such thing.
[00:18:25] It's just not a thing.
[00:18:27] In some way or other. It's going to be messy. Probably the best you can hope for is perhaps a quiet death. In fact, probably the best thing you can hope for from a Christian perspective is, is a death where you have enough time to know that death is coming and you put right, you forgive those who need to be forgiven, and you plead on the mercy of God for what comes next.
[00:18:50] Right, that's the best death. But putting that aside from a sort of the purely human practical perspective, if you like looking at death, the right measure, I think is, am I going to have a humane death? Am I going to have a communal death?
[00:19:04] Am I going to have a death where I'm cared for?
[00:19:07] So dignity is the wrong measure. But also, this comparison with animals is just so fundamentally flawed.
[00:19:13] Yes, we do actually give lethal injections to animals. And the reason we do that is because their value exists solely in their utility, what they can do for us or what they cost. And if they cost too much or they can't do anything for us anymore, then we give them a lethal injection.
[00:19:34] But a human being is not an animal.
[00:19:37] Their existence, their value is not determined. And the value of their existence is not determined on their utility, what they can do for us or what they can do for another.
[00:19:48] And that's why we treat them differently as well.
[00:19:51] Yes, we don't give our grandparents lethal injections for the same reason that we don't feed them their food from a bowl on the floor and that we don't make them sleep in a kennel outside at night.
[00:20:08] Because human persons are the imago dei.
[00:20:11] And there is nothing dignified about saying to someone, you believe your life no longer has value. We agree with you and we'll help you to end it.
[00:20:20] It's the ultimate violation of their human dignity. You're failing to recognize the profound value that still exists.
[00:20:27] Here we go. Here's another comment. I am deeply sorry for your loss.
[00:20:30] No son or daughter should have to go through this level of trauma. Unfortunately, your parents acted cowardly and completely selfishly by choosing to die together and abandon you, to grieve alone, not allowing you to care for them to the end. I love the way this woman is highlighting this. She's not. It's pretty unflinching. She's a young lady too, but she's really highlighting how we often think about or the suffering, but we forget the great and important flourishing that comes from going on that journey of grieving and dying with people and journeying with them through that. Here's another comment. It's not easy to lose a parent, but it's certainly not easy to see a person being sad all the time with a body that is deteriorating and can't function. But here's the thing. What's the answer to that?
[00:21:17] The answer is not just to observe the person experiencing the sadness and the grief of a life that is beginning to physically wind down and now has extremely increasing limitations that they didn't know before.
[00:21:32] The answer to that is to be with them and to bring them out of that sadness and to remind them that even in their vulnerability and their decreasing capacity, they still have value and we still love them and it's a great privilege to be able to serve them.
[00:21:51] She goes on to say, my mum chose euthanasia. And although we all miss her, it was the right choice. It was her choice. Her as in big capital letters. She set us all free.
[00:22:04] Now that's an interesting comment, isn't it? She set us all free.
[00:22:09] But hold on a minute. I thought euthanasia was about freeing the person.
[00:22:14] Now what you're describing is euthanasia for the benefit of those who are not elderly, who are not dying.
[00:22:24] It's about her dying so that your misery can be ended.
[00:22:30] That speaks to something deeper and more troubling.
[00:22:33] Because of her, I was walking next to one of my teenage daughters along the coastal path. In half term, I was not in the Netherlands visiting a very sick mum.
[00:22:44] So see what she said here.
[00:22:46] Because my mum ended her life.
[00:22:50] I now got to do the stuff with my daughter along the. Having a walk along nice walk along the coastal path. Otherwise I would have been in the Netherlands having to care and like visit a very sick mother.
[00:23:03] See, this is not about your mum.
[00:23:06] This is quite a revealing comment, eh? It's just. It's tragic. It's tragic, but very revealing. It's about what I got out of my mum dying.
[00:23:16] She made the decision that I needed to be next to my daughter, enjoying the Atlantic views. Thanks mum. I love you.
[00:23:24] And I have to say that this is an extremely superficial, an extremely vacuous way of thinking about life.
[00:23:33] Here's another comment. I applaud their choice.
[00:23:36] As an adult child, would you want to prolong your parents pain? Because grieving hurts.
[00:23:43] Unbelievable, eh?
[00:23:44] So now just the act of aging and living is now the evil. That's the evil. You're an evil person. If you don't want to do this.
[00:23:54] I would not wish to sit at their bedside watching their agony as they sink into pain and delirium. Fearful, confused and desperate. Desperate to go begging you and the hospital staff to help them die. This sounds like someone who either has a very fearful view of death or who has had a traumatised experience of death, of a bad death where care was not given and now that trauma is colouring their view of the world.
[00:24:17] To have the option to celebrate their lives and memories with them before they go, knowing that when in a way, they choose with dignity and love, pain free. That's beautiful. That's a gift. That would ease my grief.
[00:24:30] I'd ease your grief again. I didn't think this was about you. I thought this was about the person.
[00:24:38] But here you are saying what we really need to do is end their life. To put me out of my misery, in their life, to put them out of my misery now that's what's being said here.
[00:24:53] To have the option to celebrate their lives and memories with them before they go. You can and you should be doing that.
[00:25:00] This is again the problem. Community is broken down to such a degree that we create these little moments that celebrate someone's life.
[00:25:09] But really, shouldn't that be the daily attitude and orientation towards another, even in the difficult moments?
[00:25:16] And of course the assumption here is that the death will be dignified and it will be pain free and it will be loving.
[00:25:25] But that's not always guaranteed. In fact, increasingly what we are seeing is that there are cases where the death is not only not a dignified but one, but often the medications don't Work properly. There is increased pain. There's not the. That's the great promise. We will give you the perfect death.
[00:25:41] But they can't do that. They can't deliver that. It's an impossible promise. But we're willing to stake our lot because of a psychology that has got us so fearful of death and so obsessed with our own self gratification that we're willing to sell our birthright away for this. Here's another comment. We've talked about doing this with our children.
[00:26:05] This is what it's, you know, doing in our culture, right? It's breeding this, this creeping death.
[00:26:14] We have drunk from the cup, as Leonard Cohen once said, and the darkness is starting to consume us.
[00:26:23] We are enjoying the darkness. We're becoming addicted to it. They all support us choosing to stop living when we choose to. Neither of us could bear the grief of continuing alone, so they support us when we are at the point we simply go together. One funeral, one lot of grieving, move on and it's over.
[00:26:42] Remember with love and know that we know what we were doing and why. Our choice, pure and simple, to the end. Only true thing. Each of us possesses our own life.
[00:26:54] No one else has any right to force us to live a life we simply do not want.
[00:26:59] That is liberalism writ large. That's it right there.
[00:27:03] One funeral, one lot of grieving, move on and it's over. It's just all very perfunctory, very utilitarian.
[00:27:11] That's the promise, right? But as this very story is highlighting, the people commenting here are blind to the implications of this.
[00:27:20] That's the fantasy, right? That's the liberal fantasy and the pro euthanasia fantasy. But as this case highlights, this son is left to. To grieve and to carry that darkness all by himself. And then he's surrounded by people who are effectively suggesting to him in these sorts of comments and in a culture that somehow he's the wrong one to even say or to question what's gone on here. How dare he? How dare he. Because choice, autonomous choice, is the highest good. It is the God that we surrender ourselves too. Here's another comment. This is so beautiful. I want that choice. Someone with a different opinion. No one is forcing you, but you do not. And that's do not, as in big capitals, have the right to force me to live after I decide. And then they've followed up with a red, angry, seething emoji face.
[00:28:17] Gosh.
[00:28:19] Someone with a different opinion.
[00:28:22] That someone is their very son, who as a direct result of this beautiful Choice, as you call it, has been left to grieve and to carry that darkness alone. How dare my children demand such things from me as love and nurture. Here's another comment. What a beautiful and deeply moving story.
[00:28:48] Yet another one. It's a different commenter now. As the child of two parents with progressive illnesses, they gave to their child the most wonderful gift.
[00:28:57] See what's happening here. You can see it very clearly if you've got eyes to see.
[00:29:02] There's an increasing number of people who are starting to see euthanasia as beneficial to them, not about the benefit of the person who is being euthanised.
[00:29:13] It's about again, ending my misery by ending the life of another person.
[00:29:20] Here's another one. It's hard with him being the only child, but he gave them the greatest gift ever. I don't think he gave them any gift at all, actually letting them die with peace and dignity. Again, he didn't. He was trying to discourage that.
[00:29:35] And it was the parents who just said, no, we're going to do this anyway.
[00:29:39] Here's another one. It seems civilized and dignified.
[00:29:43] And that's the comment I want to finish on. Because an actual fact is the exact opposite of both of those things and what we see here in this comment section, that's only a tiny smidgen of the comments that are on here. And you can imagine there's a lot of one way traffic and there's a lot of comments on here.
[00:30:04] But here's the thing.
[00:30:06] This is why the west is in trouble.
[00:30:11] There's a. There's a loss of faith that has led to a dehumanization that has led to a corruption of our thinking about what is evil and what is good that has segregated us off from each other. We just are so consumed in our own silos, in our own view of reality, we don't recognize that this is the exact opposite of a civilization. A civilization is back, is built on the back of and relies on and exists because of a togetherness. A they are united, there is community. That's the whole point. And they have a higher, transcendent vision of reality.
[00:30:49] And what we have is something very different instead. And it's really heartbreaking, very tragic, the story itself, let alone the comments section.
[00:31:00] And it's a reminder, I think once again that we must be ever cautious about guarding our own heart and mind because it's very easy. Like there but for the grace of God go. I could very easily imagine myself falling into these ideologies if it wasn't for the grace of God.
[00:31:18] It's also, I think, a persistent commitment every day to love, to love God and to love what is good and true and to love your neighbour like that's your family members, the people around you. And that's all hard and it's very difficult. You've got to keep recommitting to that though. And there's also something important about the love that we're commanded to have. Like when Jesus says to us, you know, the first and most important commandment is love God with all your heart, mind and soul. And the second most important commandment, the bit that often gets missed, is when he says, love your neighbour as you love yourself.
[00:31:50] So this is not pride he's encouraging or arrogance or hubris, self love, vanity.
[00:31:55] What Christ is encouraging here is a love for our own human dignity. The fact that we are the imago dei, we should have a healthy respect for that and a love for that. And that should actually motivate us.
[00:32:09] And it's just a reminder that you have to keep recommitting yourself to that every day. And I think the most essential thing we can do, if you're listening and you're a person of faith, is to actually pray. And prayer is not our work. Prayer is us putting ourselves in the presence of God and just asking him to actually transform us to be more like the image of his son, Jesus.
[00:32:33] Prayer is the work of God in us.
[00:32:36] And I'm not sure how you really do keep doing this each day and remaining someone who is humane and who is genuinely self giving and who is not collapsing into this sort of morose ideological black hole without that. I think, yeah, it gives you the tools you need to carry on each day and also that special grace to look beyond the darkness, to see the goodness, truth and beauty and to strive in our own limited human frailty to live that out as best we possibly can and to keep accepting that each day, even when perhaps we age or we become ill and we find ourselves increasingly incapacitated. Thanks for tuning in. Don't forget, live by goodness, truth and beauty, not by lies. And I'll see you next time on the Dispatches.
[00:33:40] Sam.
