Veritas Rex reported yesterday that the country of Luxembourg has voted to legalize euthanasia, making it the third country-- besides the Netherlands and Belgium-- to do so. Rex quotes the World Congress of Families,
"Europe is quickly slipping into a new Dark Age, in the words of Winston Churchill, ‘made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.’"
Euthanasia would only be allowed by law as an option for the terminally ill, though Rex alludes to Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition who says,
"the bill would also allow individuals with 'grave and incurable' conditions to be euthanized,"
which, while painful and depleting may not be, as Rex points out, life-threatening.
One of the most famous cases of euthanasia, or assisted suicide, in Europe was the fight for the right to die with dignity that was fought by Spaniard Ramon Sampedro, who was paralyzed in a diving accident at 25 and fought for the right to die for the next 29 years. According to an article in TIME Magazine,
"Ramon Sampedro was a live head on a dead body. That's a brutal description of full paralysis, but it's the way he saw it...many years ago Ramon decided he could no longer bear the life of a tuned mind atop an insensate body, dependent from teeth to toenails and each pore and sphincter in between.
So he opted for death. He didn't proselytize; he agreed that others similarly afflicted might lead fulfilled lives, but he rejected the claims of church and state that he must not choose to die."
In the end, Sampedro was assisted in his death by his friend Ramona Maneiro who videotaped Sampedro's final words and agonising last moments. According to the New York Times,
"as an expression of solidarity with those who assisted Mr. Sampedro, thousands of Spaniards sent letters to the government claiming responsibility for providing the cup of poison."
Sampedro's life and death was made into an Oscar winning film directed by Alejandro Amenabar and starring Javier Bardem as Sampedro. In this scene, Sampedro argues with a priest over his right to die:
Loosely translated, the discussion goes something like this:
Boy speaking for Priest: "...and since we are inside eternity life is not ours. then, of course, we take our bourgois sense of it...of private property to a ridiculous extreme."
Sampedro: "But the Church was always the first to secularize private property.'
Priest: "Tell him it would be a process...as far as continuing life goes."
Sampedro: "Why does the Church cling so passionately to fearing death? Because they know they would lose a great deal of customers if people are no longer afraid of the other side. And 67% of Spaniards favor euthanasia."
Priest: "Tell him moral questions are not solved through polls..."
Sampedro: "I'm surprised you show such sensitivity toward my life since the institution you represent condemned those who didn't think correctly to be burnt alive."
Priest: "The freedom that ends life is no freedom at all."
Sampedro: "And a life that ends freedom isn't a life either."
The philosopher David Hume argued that in the face of extreme suffering, suicide is perfectly logical and that our fear of death can be viewed as unreasonable once the superstitions of religion are removed. Wrote Hume,
"Every event is alike important in the eyes of that infinite being, who takes in at one glance the most distant regions of space, and remotest periods of time. There is no event, however important to us, which he has exempted from the general laws that govern the universe, or which he has peculiarly reserved for his own immediate action and operation. The revolution of states and empires depends upon the smallest caprice or passion of single men; and the lives of men are shortened or extended by the smallest accident of air or dies, sunshine or tempest. Nature still continues her progress and operation; and if general laws be ever broke by particular volitions of the Deity, 'tis after a manner which entirely escapes human observation"
Virgina Woolf, in her novel Mrs. Dalloway, argued that as,
"A young man had killed himself...he had flung it away...they would grow old...obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate...There was an embrace in death...But this young man who had killed himself-- had he plunged holding his treasure?'If it were now to die 'twere now to be most happy' "
And in the film The Hours, there is a scene in which Woolf, as played by Nicole Kidman, argues for a patient's right to self-determination:
"The alchamists had a saying," wrote Jeanette Winterson in The World and Other Places, " 'Tertium non datur.' The third is not given." Our fear of death is, quite simply, only our fear of the unknown. Yet, there is something in us that springs eternal. Buddhist call it reincarnation; Christians call it resurrection; Science calls it the conservation of mass: matter is neither created nor destroyed. As Winterson wrote in GUT Symmetries,
"Theoretically there will be no death, only an exchange of energy into what is likely to be another dimension."
Shakespeare wrote that "Everything that lives must die, passing into eternity" (Hamlet Act I Scene 2). But we do not die and pass into eternity-- we are born into eternity. Life is eternal; "we are inside eternity," already; therefore, death is nothing to fear because death, as we conceive it, does not exist. It is not the dead we mourn for-- we mourn for ourselves; we mourn for our own loss.
The dead have no need of our tears.