Barbara Kay writes a funny column about attempts to legalize euthanasia in the form of a letter to her children:
I do not want to be bumped off. I can’t state the case more unequivocally than that. I don’t care if I am a “burden” to you (you were once to me, that’s how life works); I don’t care how long it takes me to die, and how inconvenient that is to the medical system; and I don’t care how selfless an example other parents are setting in graciously exiting the world for their dependents’ sake before nature intended.
The whole thing is worth reading, if only because it’s not often that one can laugh while reading about euthanasia.
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I find the “right to a natural life span” line rather amusing. Not the right part, but the natural part. What is a natural human life span? It varies a bit throughout history, if you include infant mortality in the figures, until the 20th century you’d be lucky to live to fourty. There is nothing natural about the life span today – it’s the result of unnaturally plentyful food, a scientific understanding of disease transmission, and the work of centuries of medical advances.
A “right to a natural life span” suggests we keep people alive until fourty, then send them out to die in the wilderness.
Don’t take this as an argument for or against euthanasia. But lets just leave nature out of it.
Moses said, “As for the days of our life, they contain seventy years, or if due to strength, eighty years, yet their pride is but labour and sorrow; for soon it is gone and we fly away” (Ps. 90:10). For any given period and people in history, there does seem to be a natural lifespan.
Suriocou also said, “It varies a bit throughout history, if you include infant mortality in the figures, until the 20th century you’d be lucky to live to fourty [sic].” If you want to include infant mortality, then perhaps you should also include abortions, etc. (though we can’t know them all).
The misspelling of forty is rather annoying, because I knew that was spelt wrong, and actually checked it… but, rather than go to the trouble of getting word loaded, I just stuck it in google – and it’s a common enough misspelling that it worked there anyway :>
I included infant mortality because I had no reason to exclude it. And it was the first set of good statistics I found.
Checking with Google, I find that the American death rate is 8.27 deaths/1,000 population (2008 est.). With a total population of 300 million, America has 2.5 million people die every year. However, I highly doubt that abortions are factored into the death rate. The 1 million forced abortions every year lower life expectancy from 70 or 80 years to only 50 or 60 years. If you’re going to include infant mortality, then I think you might as well include forced abortions.
I don’t think the precise figure matters – and besides, that’s the modern statistic. The important part of my argument is that, prior to the invention of unnatural medical technology and resource abundance, the average lifespan was far shorter than today. So it makes no sense to talk of a ‘right to a natural lifespan’ – the lifespan expected of the average person in a developed country today is highly unnatural already.
I enjoy hair-splitting as much as the next Cartesian, but I think most people would assume “natural lifespan” today to mean “when my body gives up and not before”. The big worry out there is that old people who are starting to become more dependent on others are going to be dispatched “unnaturally” fast by “caregivers” who can’t be bothered to care no more.
Maybe I’m the weirdo, but nobody I know goes around saying things like: “I expect to live until age 81 because that’s what the latest figures say my life expectancy as a non-smoking female living in urban Ontario ought to be.” But I hear a lot of “I don’t want to be snuffed out before my time” without precise references to time and date of said time.