Why yes, we have entered the portion of this blog where I tackle all the controversial topics back to back. And just before the fundraiser too. I always manage to offend ten or twenty people with this stuff, too. But–
But the muse wants what it wants, and this is the blog muse, so deal.
I came at this one topic via a pro-abortion (sorry, only possible characterization) tweet which blamed a mother for carrying a “defective” child to term, classifying it as “Selfishness” since the child would never have “A normal life.”
I have no idea what the child’s defect was honestly, but considering abortion has been recommended for everything from small-ish and overcome-able physical defects to presumed mental issues, it could be anything really.
I think everyone knows my opinion on this. Or at least my “lived opinion.” As in, while I wouldn’t at the time — I was not even thirty — have disputed the “quality of life” thing, when they assured me older son would be retarded and I needed to abort now, I told them to put it up their jumper, because after six years of infertility I was going to have whatever was in there, even if it turned out to be a cat. Because when push came to shove, his being alive trumped everything else. Now, mind, this might not be a great endorsement, since I’m famously incapable of killing even defective quail.
But when I was following the discussion about the tweet in one of my groups, the whole “Quality of life” hit me wrong.
And I’m the first person to admit it’s a very difficult topic, and the shades of grey are deep enough that you don’t know where plain black and white ends. But I also think the truth should be told.
Had my child turned out to be, as they said he’d be, completely non-functional and unable to live alone (Turns out they might have been right. I mean, he IS married.) would I have regretted bringing him into the world? Undoubtedly. I have had friends with children who would never be able to function independently and who, besides that, had extensive requirements merely to stay alive. It’s the sort of thing that eats a good parent alive. You don’t want to let the kid go to an institution that might abuse him/her. But on the other hand, your life is over the moment the child is born.
Cases like that, and your being absolutely sure early on — and there’s the rub — I might still be unable to have an abortion, but I would not judge anyone who did. After all, particularly if there are other children involved, something like that can destroy not just a parent, but an entire family. I’d still consider it wrong, but there are wrongs you can forgive, if only because you imagine how tempted you might be, and that you might in fact succumb.
But it’s not the quality of life of the child, even in those cases. Oh, it might be. The child might be miserable. But here’s the thing: as someone who was a very sickly child, in and out of hospitals, and with her whole body turning into open sores on the regular for no reason anyone could determine, if you’d asked about my quality of life, I’d have been confused. Oh, not because I didn’t understand the question, but because…. well? It was fine. I mean, sure, it sucked if you compared it to other kids. But I’d always been sickly. Spending enormous amount of time in bed alone (because antibiotics were new enough isolation was still common even for “just” colds) in a room without a window was just how 50% of my time was spent. I learned to have a rich life of the imagination, building lego towns and imagining people or aliens living in them and creating entire (very odd. Think of a 3 or 4 year old’s understanding of the world) soap operas for such beings. Or later reading comics and day dreaming. I mean, I did enjoy those. I had a happy childhood despite the frequent illnesses. Quality of life sucked, but only compared to normal kids. I’d never been a normal kid, so how could I know?
Again what that discomfort about “Quality of life” hit me, I had to do a deep dive, because I’m notoriously reluctant to kill anything that’s not attacking/hurting me. And even then, I’ve been known to carefully relocate biting bugs, to avoid killing them. Not a Buddhist, just cracked.
While we take pets on the final sad trip to the vet, we don’t do it lightly, and probably should do it much earlier. But in their case, I actually don’t do it because I’m careful to distinguish MY quality of life and theirs. I’ve seen too many pets killed for their owners’ convenience, and while yeah, pets, not humans, it’s still a life with some level of sentience, and since I can’t create it, I’m careful about destroying it. Take Euclid: he was mostly incontinent and a pain to live with for the last five years of his life, but he seemed perfectly happy toddling around in a diaper and getting pets and sleeping on the sofa. It wasn’t until I saw him pee in his water then drink that I realized things were really really far gone. (And even now I wonder if I just had him killed for my ew.)
But when it comes to people…. Well, it’s different. Because when it comes to people, who are you to judge their quality of life? And where does that slippery slope end.
I watched a pro-euthanasia movie once, and I can’t remember the name which is probably good. It had the most deceptive description which made it sound like a rom com, so Dan started watching it, and the situation was interesting enough that I started watching.
It was a woman hired to care for a young man who is paraplegic after an accident, and they fall in love. Fine. He’s also a multi millionaire, so his disability is really mitigated. Money cannot give him back the ability to walk and move, but it can mitigate discomfort, hire people to help him move/fetch/carry and give him a “nurse” who really is supposed to amuse him and read to him and such.
The not at all subtle message, carried in the end, is that he chooses to die because he can’t be normal, and that’s the highest, most moral choice he can make.
It left me baffled and vaguely disgusted. In the way of such things, it had been established he could function as a male, and could in fact feel it. And also that the girl wanted children.
But he chooses — note these are words put in the character’s mouth by oh so compassionate writers — death instead because he can never go to Paris and walk around as he once did. Why, people will stare at him being in a wheel chair! It’s unbearable!
Watching it, and while the movie used all the soft lighting and the girl “understanding” to justify the choice, I kept getting furious.
Why is his life unendurable? Because people might stare and pity him? So he’s dying for pride? Seems dumb to me.
We have someone who is wealthy beyond the dreams of most of us, who, while confined in some ways, has the means to counter his disability. He could have an adoring wife to whom he could give a very good life. He could have a passel of kids and watch them grow up and have good lives. But the movie tells us none of this is worth it because he can’t be perfect, and therefore his quality of life is not worth living.
Which is always the way these things go, and Canada’s MAID is set on proving it.
Look, at least the movie had the point that this was a young man who had lost what he used to have. Now in my opinion the proper treatment for that is to have psychological counseling so he sees what is still worth it about his life, but at least you can understand the shock and the outrage. Now imagine someone who’s been “like that” their whole life. Sure, their “quality of life” might be bad to an outsider. But from the inside, what else have they ever known?
And that’s exactly the problem. The merchants of death and despair who posit “just kill him/her/it” as fixing every ill and who claim to do it out of compassion for other’s “quality of life” are not qualified to classify anyone’s quality of life FROM THE OUTSIDE.
If you judge it by achievements, I’ve known people who were profoundly handicapped who had better and more “worthy” lives than a lot of completely “whole” people. The best student in my university graduating class (Fortunately in another major/minor, or I’d be wholly eclipsed) was a Thalidomide baby. He didn’t let it slow him down, and I suspect he’s now a professor or retired professor of French or Latin. Judging by the bevy of girls who helped him with everything from pushing his wheel chair to lighting his cigarette, he’s also probably married and with children. These are speculation, of course, but if they didn’t come true, it was by his choice. In our early twenties, he was doing very well indeed.
One of the kids’ playfriends had a mother who appeared perfectly normal. Mother of 3, and a painter. I didn’t even realize until we’d had a lot of contact that she had a prosthetic arm. And it wasn’t until I saw her in shorts and a tiny t-shirt that I realized she also had a prosthetic leg. One of those weird things? Apparently the umbilical cord had wrapped around the limbs and effectively killed them? Or at least that’s what I remember from what I was told. If that’s impossible, it’s still close to what I was told. Normal genes, just didn’t develop right. She was close to fifteen years younger than I, so there’s a good chance the mother knew in advance, but chose not to abort. Or maybe it was too early to know. But in the end, does it matter? Yes, she had the problem of getting, maintaining, using prosthetics. But she was a happy woman, leading a full life.
And all of us know dozens of these examples. Including people who made significant contributions to science and tech.
Should they never have existed, or have been killed early? Who are we to say? Sure, their lives look difficult to us, but hear me out here: They’re the only lives they had and will ever have. And some of them are demonstrably quite happy and productive.
Meanwhile how many people with all limbs and tested high IQs do absolutely nothing with their lives or, worse, are drains on everyone else’s resources, because they’re always depressed, or broke, or simply unable to get themselves to some sort of semblance of functioning, let alone happiness?
Which frankly is why pre-birth or after birth euthanasia, while it might start from the highest principles or at least a justifiable sense of compassion (most often for the parents and family, not the person, but still justifiable) always ends in eugenics. EVERY SINGLE TIME.
It might start with “This person will suffer their entire lives and die young” but it always ends in “Lives unworthy of living.”
And the reasons the lives are unworthy always ends up more and more tenuous, until in the end you’re killing people for being goofy, or depressed, or having no financial sense.
In its most poisonous version, it convinces the person themselves of it. It convinces them to compare themselves to a platonic ideal of themselves, and feel unhappy with everything they are and have achieved, because they don’t have this one thing.
So we get to: “I am sometimes sad, therefore I should die, because that’s terrible.” Or “I am poor and can’t enjoy the good things in life, therefore it’s best I should die.”
It might sound like I’m exaggerating wildly, but I’ve seen similar cases reported for Canada and — I think — Holland (Though it might be Belgium.)
What it amounts to, even when it’s “assisted suicide” (Let’s talk about the influence of doctors over those who are sick or even “merely” depressed, shall we?) and much more so when it’s euthanasia, is people looking from the outside and deciding that if they were the other person they’d be unhappy, so the other person should die.
Following the reasoning of euthanasia, I should be put out of my misery, because at almost 40 books, I still haven’t had a world-shattering bestseller. Even if I rather enjoy my writing, as do other people, at least occasionally.
The problem with judging if your life is “worthy of living” is that it always ends up being judging what you have and what you are against some imaginary “Perfect.”
The perfect is the enemy of the good, and even the most hale, fit and brilliant among us, always fall far short of perfect (being human.)
Which means seen and judged from the outside, the perfect is the enemy of all life.
And in the end the perfection the merchants of death would achieve is the clean perfection of a rock, scrubbed clean of all life, rolling through the loneliness of space forever.
World without end.
According To Hoyt 
“…tweet which blamed a mother for carrying a “defective” child to term, classifying it as “Selfishness” since the child would never have “A normal life.””
Better than NO life, I dare say.
Speaking as a medical professional who worked with severe brain and spinal cord injury patients, even the most f-ed of them with zero working parts would sooner be alive than dead. You don’t have to ask them, they will tell you.
Because when you’re dead, you are DEAD.
I think the most heinous part of these activists is that they truly care nothing for the mothers or the babies. Nothing. Pure party politics, and that’s it. Evil.
Hey, pro-abortionists! That was your guy #Brandon last night, promoting your cause. What a great job, eh? Looks good on you.
I saw someone literally argue that Sarah Palin should have had an abortion because by coping with a Down Syndrome baby, she would set a bad example by causing other women to think they could cope when maybe they couldn’t.
Uuuugh. Talk about someone coming across as a concern-troll, even if the person truly meant well. That’s terrible.
The absolutely horrifying and disgusting way the left treated Palin they don’t have cause to give her advice for ANYTHING. They were afraid of her and tried to destroy her. They’re even more afraid of Trump because he refuses to be destroyed.
This kid has lived more than I:
I had no idea that wheelchair eXtreme sports was even a thing. Impressive.
I notice that these end of life programs mostly happen in “compassionate socialist” countries. Could it have something to do with these people becoming a drain on the state?
Yes, for me I always think of the line in A Canticle for Leibowitz, “Pain is the only evil I know”, used to justify killing all the reminders of bad decisions by government officials.
Of all the ways to go, dying for the convenience of a bureaucracy has to be nearly the most nightmarish. Dying so somebody has a few more dollars/pounds/euros to spend somewhere else is pretty awful as well.
Your example, of course, combines the elements of both. I can only hope that never becomes my fate.
Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.
Just make sure you have an honour guard for your trip to the blessed lands.
Same. Was asked if we wanted prenatal fetus tests. FWIW I was 32. First child. Not first pregnancy. While getting pregnant wasn’t easy, I was losing the pregnancy before 12 weeks. Answer to doing the prenatal tests was not only “no” but “no, not happening”. Staff asked why. Why? Don’t care what the results were, if this one did not self abort, then I wouldn’t consider it.
Also same.
Sister has had two abortions. Both medical. They had two children when the first one was required, 3 children when the second one was required. Both ectopic. She was told to have a full hysterectomy after the second. Didn’t have that until after the birth of their 4th child, third successful pregnancy. Oldest is adopted because they were told she could never have children (not even ectopic).
Hysterectomy not generally recommended that I am aware of for preventing future ectopics. At least going back 40 – 50 years. A good medical reference regarding current risks and management is fairly technical but most folks should be able to get good information:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7414932/
Wasn’t just the ectopic pregnancies, quite. Reason she “couldn’t get pregnant” (they got that wrong) was her tubes were blocked and extreme scaring around the ovaries, tubes, and uterus. Tubes were also adhered to the uterus. Cause: Very bad endometriosis. After the first successful surprise pregnancy, concluded that tubes were adhered to the ovaries, but (obviously) not blocked between there and the ovaries. Her unique condition raised the odds of ectopic pregnancies.
:says a lot of bad words:
Gosh, amazing how that– untreated, not even looked for, treated like at most another reason to be on The Pill — keeps popping up in these kind of discussions.
I know several women who have had really bad periods for their entire lives… Almost uniformly endometriosis. One had doctors telling her it was all in her head, then when they actually looked during her pregnancy they discovered she’d had really massive scarring from it going untreated.
I wouldn’t blame her for meeting those doctors in the parking lot with a tire iron.
Good info. Agree.
I was glad that now there’s a blood test they can use to screen for genetic abnormalities that has no risks to the fetus. If my Sam was going to need special care, I wanted to know as soon as possible. Not to get an abortion, but simply to work through the grief and prepare for a different future before I was sleep deprived and caring for an infant.
Opportunity for preparation – mental, emotional and physical – is probably the best reason to get such a test.
I know of a case where the woman arranged for the baby to be operated on the day of her birth for spina bifada, and even went to stay at her mother’s because that was nearer to the hospital they had chosen and she didn’t want to risk early labor. (Especially since the plan was that her older daughter would stay with her mother while she was in the hospital.)
Though that was the interesting one. Her first ultrasound raised the possibility of no diaphragm — 50% survival — or no lungs — as the medical books put it, not usually compatible with life. When the doctor came to give the diagnosis she was screaming But the lungs? Are the lungs all right? Announcing the diagnosis to a blog full of people hoping and praying after the first one brought much rejoicing.
Nowadays there are places that can do surgery before birth and finish the gestation.
Yes. My brother’s childhood best friend was a fetal cardiologist.
Yes. The reason I didn’t have them done, and I guess dep didn’t is because back then there was a risk of causing miscarriage. Not worth it.
Took care of my deceased mother’s dog for three years after she passed, despite the fact that he hated just about everything and everyone. But on the last vet trip, when he was over 14… well. The dog marked as a vicious biter, who would try to take our hands off just for rubbing his ears to clean them, let the vet tech pick him up and carry him. That’s when we knew he’d had enough.
We cleaned everything, crate, dishes, you name it, double-washed and dried the bedding, and gave it all to a local shelter. Meds and all. I hope they helped.
This was the dog of the same woman who once told me I should have been culled because of something that is purely physical appearance, so… yeah. I have opinions when people bring up “quality of life”.
The only one I have no regrets about the final trip is Pixie. He was in so much pain, and he KNEW what was coming.
Greebo…. I only regret not getting a second opinion. But he was also in so much pain and I was so worried for his suffering. I should have got a second opinion, though. The vet was very weird on one of the readings, which makes me wonder.
*Hugs*
:hugs:
For what it is worth, you have my great respect.
It was, as they say, rotten work. But he was a living being and it wasn’t his fault he was raised by crazy. We did what we could, we made sure he got all the walks he wanted (oh boy was that interesting when he’d never been walked on a leash before), and… well.
If someone ever asks why? Because it was the right thing to do.
Thus great respect.
Some folks seem to choose sociopathy, as a convenient mode of navigating life.
They declare that the “othered” do not matter, and as long as someone else handles the murder, they are totally cool with it.
Disgraceful.
:hugs: I still reread your fics for a pick-me-up and have been thinking of rereading Oni the Lonely. I talked it up a while back to someone I met when we were sharing book recommendations. Hoping to do more of that, where I can.
:more hugs:
Trying to get my allergies under control enough to have enough energy to write faster. ATM filling in the holes in the Colors draft, a bit at a time.
…This is going to be a relatively long story to get the whole world set up!
(Today I fleshed out the scripted bit where characters negotiated with a dokkaebi. Eep!)
“(Today I fleshed out the scripted bit where characters negotiated with a dokkaebi. Eep!)”
:looks up dokkaebi: EEEP!!!!
No rush, really! I get it. I’m trying to haul things across the finish line, too. Feels like I’m spinning my wheels. :hugs: I’m not trying to push. Just letting you know you make good stuff and I like to share it. ❤
Yay!
…And heh. Part of it’s a delicate balance of negotiation. If someone powerful enough to actually fight the dokkaebi was there, they might not get him to talk at all….
Sort of like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BllIODb81Q8
Eh, not really… the characters who go to talk to him are, I think, more what you’d call low-midlevel. They have experience in tight spots!
We took in inlaws last husky. He was 10 years old. Did not have him very long. We’d come back from the FIL’s funeral and found K collapsed. Boys (hubby and BIL) rushed K and MIL to the emergency clinic. K recovered after original assessment, but before veterinarian saw him. Brought him home. K was okay for the summer. We brought him home when MIL went into assisted living. We hadn’t had him home more than 3 weeks and it happened again. Only we were able to get him to our veterinarian clinic before the closed. Immediately got xrays. K’s lower back was disintegrated, in pieces. We let him go. Got to do the same to my German Shepard less than 5 months later. Knew she was sick and had been for months relating to her stroke about March ’89 (note, I’m 6 months pregnant) and ongoing seizures. The clue by 4 for me? She loved, adored infants. She was raised her first 7 months with an 8 month old (cousin). We finally had an infant in our household, and she was too sick to care. She was 14.
These are only two stories of the 14 pets we’ve had to make final choices for. The only one that was easy (wags hand) was K’s mother T. She died of a heart attack at the veterinarian clinic kennel. Medical was there immediately. Being home wouldn’t have helped the outcome (though wish we were there). We weren’t there because we were away at a wedding. They, T, K, and the German Shepard, were there for kenneling, not medical. Not their first time being there, so wasn’t the stress.
I’m thinking of an early pro-assisted-suicide article.
My rough memory was a person killing a patient mainly because he got tired of hearing her.
She wasn’t his patient but he kept “hearing” her when he was the on-duty late-shift doctor at the hospital.
Note, I had to decide about Mom when it came to a “she might not survive the surgery, even if she survived, she might be worse than before” situation. I decided for her not having the surgery. Of course, before this final thing, Mom wasn’t mentally “here”.
That’s the hard one. Not deciding for other people, but deciding for *me* for other people.
And not knowing where the lines are drawn.
Years ago, before a company crawfish boil, an engineer was asked to attend, but he was hesitant because he wanted to bring his wife, and their daughter, who had Down Syndrome. Since everyone invited could bring their family, the answer was “of course”, and they came.
When they arrived, I could see the concern in his eyes. His wife had the same expression, but their daughter was overjoyed with the event. Watching them relax, the daughter extremely happy, and the lack of any problem with anyone else, made the event even more special. If I had to analyze their quality of life at that moment, I could only describe it as wonderful.
Ok, up front, I have a dark streak (very) in some of my humor. Working as an EMT, cop, in corrections etc. I got to see/experience some things. One ‘joke’ was laughed at with fellow cops, etc. when a really poor excuse for a human finally killed themselves in a drunken wreck was how they were just a retroactive abortion. Ha-ha. Yeah… but the ones that tore us up would be the poor little kids that died and we had to deal with it. So, you cope. As for anyone really supporting euthanasia – nope.
While there may be occasion, it should be unique and very, very uncommon for anyone to die because they are “defective” or other justification nonsense unless… and that’s personal, unique and not for me to decide.
The last time I read about “perfect” it included a nice poster of a blue-eyed, blond young man in his brown uniform being excited to join the SS. I’ll pass on that, thank you.
Kevorkian’s should never have a choice to make on quality of life issues. I see issues of this type as a judgement on one’s humanity; if you want to end a life for ‘quality of life’ issues, then you are not human in my viewpoint.
Those parents who choose to let their child live despite limitations? They exemplify humanity at the finest.
I read an article about a couple who learned that their very-much-wanted baby had a defect that meant, in essence, she was never going to be viable. She wasn’t dead in the womb, but basically (iirc) she had no brain at all, so while in utero she would continue to develop organs, etc, she could not survive birth. They were advised to abort.
Instead, they chose to carry her to term so that her organs and other things could be used to save other children. (And, I presume, on the very miniscule chance that the doctors were wrong and she COULD survive. Alas, it was not so.) It was one of the bravest damn things I’ve ever read about, and a defiant spit in the eye to the pro-abortionists.
Not the only couple who has done so. Every time a couple makes this choice, they get blasted with hit pieces by the pro abortionists.
You have to wonder why. Guilt over their past questionable decisions, maybe? Or regret for their own lack of character? Attacks of this sort against people with whom they have no relationship otherwise are usually one or the other; it’s almost never actually about the target of their venom.
Guilty conscience, and deep-seated fear of being held to a standard… that they know they are failing.
The people who scream hardest about not judging are the ones who are judging everyone else constantly, and trying to force the world to be what they want it to be, not what it is.
As the Good Book says, those who do evil hate the light… and to willingly choose to walk in the light will always bring the howls that there should be no Light, and we all need to praise the Darkness.
Probably because they want to take the organs out after killing the baby to make a profit. It’s the only acceptable way. See Planned Parenthood selling baby parts to universities and labs for testing. :spit:
Not merely the baby parts. University labs ordered the living late-term aborted babies sent alive to be vivisected. It’s the only way to get livers, kidneys, etc. in good enough condition to be used to test pharmaceutical interventions.
Yes. You do need God to be good. Or at least to have something approaching ethical scientists.
I had the misfortune to know some
ladies–nope, they weren’t thatfemales who casually used abortion when their half-assed birth control methods didn’t work. Hearing the casual “Blank got an abortion, and so it goes.” was spine chilling.Took some work to deal with that attitude. Shudder.
I have a cousin who got back test results that said the baby wouldn’t survive. The doctors recomended killing it. My cousin and his wife refused. Turns out they mixed up the tests. The baby was fine. He’s in the Navy and about to get married.
Once talked with a woman at a church event who had twice gotten such results. Told the doctor what he could do with them. Has two healthy sons. Apparently just false positives.
I’m glad I lived where I lived when we found out at 20 weeks our 4th child was still alive technically but wouldn’t survive outside the womb. The maternal fetal medicine doctor sat down with us and went over the diagnosis, the ultimate prognosis for our baby, and laid out every path possible from then on, including termination as early as possible, as well as the possibility of terminate early but with intent to deliver alive (i.e. don’t kill the baby before it comes out – which you never really hear about as a possibility). BUT he only laid them out as some of several possibilities and as soon as we rejected it, he supported us in the decision we ultimately came to. We were able to deliver him at 35 weeks and have 5 lovely hours with him before he passed. We were able to have as much family around as possible.
A friend from our support group was living in a different state when her baby with the same issue was diagnosed in utero. She had to fight to stay pregnant until delivery. The doctors wouldn’t let up on trying to convince her to abort.
I was subjected to a barrage of “You must abort” for the last six months of my first pregnancy.
Son is fine. Has an advanced degree. Is married. … I was just terrified for six months.
Much respect. Not quitting when the supposed “authority” / “expert” keeps saying quit is -hard-.
Much respect.
With the recent significant reduction in respect (with ample cause) for “experts” that is becoming much easier, at least among those capable of rational thought.
I didn’t have that problem, at least. Question asked, answered, made sure wasn’t changing my mind. And done. Never mentioned again. I asked was there a danger to the baby. Long enough ago so invasive, thus yes. Knew false positive was definitely an issue, didn’t know the percentages, but there. Given my history of “spontaneous involuntary abortion”, which was one of the possible consequences of invasive testing, “not a chance in hell”, was definitely the reaction. Edited that to a simple short emphatic “Not Interested.”
Prevents both malpractice and wrongful birth suits.
You now make the third person I know who has a healthy, happy, wonderful child saved from the doctors who wanted it dead. The other two are personal friends. How many more must be out there?
What a world.
That’s not a doctor’s job. A doctor should analyze the patient’s medical condition, lay out the options and explain the probable results of each option, so the patient can make an informed decision.
At that point, the doctor should shut the f*k up.
Problem is, doctors don’t work for their patients these days. They work for the medical, insurance and government bureaucrats. Patients are just annoying widgets, to be dealt with as cheaply and efficiently as possible.
National Health, as practiced in Canada, is coming to all of us.
I may have been the one to specifically mention ‘quality of life’, talking about one of our former governor’s statements.
Yes. You were. But that’s what they bring up if you question them.
even when presented with evidence otherwise.
Of course, they probably would think that Stephen Hawking was a candidate for assisted suicide, if you deleted the ‘brilliant astrophysicist’ part.
It was the classic counter to eugenists: describe a family, say that the mother was pregnant, listen to the eugenists say that the baby should be aborted as inferior, and point out the baby was, in fact, Ludwig van Beethoven.
I’ve watched both of my grandmothers die in agonizing pain – one from dementia, one from simple old age. And it was genuinely painful to watch, because who wants to listen to the labored breathing of someone who can’t even swallow anymore, whose tongue you moisten with a sponge so that it doesn’t crack and bleed, who has insane dosages of morphine administered every hour just so they can lie there dying a little more comfortably?
But palliative care is very different from assisted suicide or abortion. I abhor both with all the strength of my soul, because life is precious. We fear old age and its discomforts, and hate imperfections and blemishes. I think our culture is so afraid of death that (ironically) we look away from its stark reality and ignore the dreadful weight of meaning it held in wiser times. We shut it away in hushed funeral halls and use euphemism to avoid even speaking of death and the grave. We don’t allow grief or public displays of mourning for people anymore, only for causes.
Our culture is sick and perhaps dying, and we have lost the art of allowing an imperfect life lived well, as much as we have forgotten how to grieve and mourn for lives cut short or stretched out in suffering.
I think there’s an element that no longer accepts death is an inevitable part of life. That somehow with enough technology, no one will ever die. And so they shy away from it.
Tis sweet and commendable in your nature to give these mourning duties to your father, but you know, your father lost a father, and that father lost lost his.
Argh … can’t quite remember the rest … time to copy/ paste.
and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow. But to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness. ’Tis unmanly grief.
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,
An understanding simple and unschooled.
For what we know must be and is as common
As any the most vulgar thing to sense,
Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart? Fie, ’tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd, whose common theme
Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried,
From the first corse till he that died today,
“This must be so.”
And some respond by killing because they aren’t going to accept death unless they control it. They can either delude themselves into thinking the baby is immortal, or kill the baby, and can’t accept letting nature do its thing.
I get you on your grandmothers. My family tends to go fulminatingly fast, and I hope I’m not an exception. I don’t fear death, but I hate the idea of going by inches.
My FIL took months to die, like your grandmother. But I’m glad he was allowed, and not killed.
This has been a very relevant post in more days than one. I just got out of the theater, I treated my mom and me to a Quiet Place: First Day and – SPOILER ALERT –
The Main Character is terminally ill, so the End of the World has less of an effect on her than the rest of New York City. All she wants is one last pizza before she dies. And ultimately decides to go for Euthanasia by Space Monster than the long slow way.
“So we get to: “I am sometimes sad, therefore I should die, because that’s terrible.” Or “I am poor and can’t enjoy the good things in life, therefore it’s best I should die.”
This was a lot of my late/teens and early twenties before my cry for help, diagnosis and treatment. I’m in a much better place thankfully but it’s still hard, I’m still pretty poor and it’s often a struggle so these thoughts come up alot.
“It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” — Woody Allen
My dad slipped down a slippery slope, but in the end it was fairly fast. He went from falling, mom had to call paramedics to help him up. Hospice then got him a hospital bed for the home. Although he fell coming back from the bathroom so not sure how that was suppose to help. Didn’t matter. Dad died that night just before midnight.
My FIL OTOH fought for every breath and every day. He’d had his second major heart attack 23 years after his first one. They sent him home for Thanksgiving with prognosis he wouldn’t last until Christmas. We were suppose to spend Thanksgiving with my folks, then Christmas with hubby’s. We switched because of FIL. Drive over to Bend from Eugene. I wasn’t taking long narrow windy drives well about that time. Morning sickness (weird name for something that lasts all dang day for 6 months). But inlaws did not know that. We weren’t telling until we were sure we would get past the first trimester (which is further than we’d gotten before). Kind of gave it away, by heading to the bathroom immediately on arrival. Not greeting anyone first. Hubby is left assuring everyone that what I had was “not catching” (I wish!). My MIL and SIL both nurses caught the clue. FIL not only lasted past Christmas ’88, but into early May ’89. He was bound and determined to see that next grandchild born. Missed by not quite 6 weeks. No way were we going to deny him the chance.
Mom died of a very aggressive inoperable lung cancer. Despite being given a short-term prognosis, she lasted about eight and a half years.
Stubborn, she was. Cats envied that stubborn.
During her first radiation series, she took a magician’s lightbulb with her. “Doc, I am feeling OK after all that, but I am having this weird side effect…” (hand held lightbulb lights up)
-Totally- boggled the folks. -Epic- prank. -Classic- mom.
I do miss her….
She sounds awesome.
I’m attaching odd things again, but the subject brings this song to mind, or at least, it’s title:
I appreciate the post immensely. However, the graphic has me puzzled. That looks like blood in the syringe. Is it HIV tainted and about to be injected maliciously? Lots of injectable drugs are red, but generally bright red, other than perhaps some iron injections. So I was distracted trying to figure out this conundrum during the entire read. That’s not your fault, but I thought I’d share that anyway.
The ectopic pregnancy issue is a syringe of a different color. If it is a tubal pregnancy, the pregnancy rarely passes 12 weeks, and if untreated leads to severe and frequently fatal bleeding for the mother. It is not classified as an abortion to remove a tubal pregnancy. Right now the medical technology is not available to somehow transplant the tubal pregnancy to a safe environment to allow it to grow, though conceivably in future this might be possible. Tubal pregnancies are thought to occur in about 1 out of every 50 pregnancies.
Extra tubal pregnancies are rare, and about one in 3 million can lead to normal baby that has to be delivered by abdominal surgery. The other 299,999,999 don’t survive and if not caught early can lead to maternal death or severe illness.
Ending an ectopic pregnancy is not considered an abortion, medically or legally in the USA.
Legally, I know.
Every single time I miscarried, it has been labeled “spontaneous involuntary abortion“. Yes, I resent the entries.
I know my sister considered her ectopic pregnancies to be abortions of fetus. They were tubal pregnancies. They had no choice. Don’t know how far along. Then? No. But could a tubal fetus be removed, frozen, and implanted correctly (IVF), now? Do not know how the procedures were labeled on her medical charts.
No, the procedure can’t be done now. In future? Who knows?
ectopic pregnancies are death sentences for both mom and baby. Terminating them saves the mom. Only pro-deathers confuse it with abortion, in order to muddy the issue.
The illustration is just pixabay, syringe. Don’t OVERTHINK! (She says, to someone on her blog. GAH)
.LOL.
me, OVERTHINK?
I haven’t even gotten started…
All right, which wine glass? 🙂
I’m not telling
What’s that over there?!?
My sister’s youngest boy is severely handicapped and she finally facing having to institutionalize him as he’s now a 250 lbs 3 year old. One way of looking at it is that he shattered that family — the marriage didn’t survive him. The other is that he saved it since his brothers take great care of him. Given what a POS the BIL turned out to be I think the family would have broken up completely if they weren’t looking after him.
👍
I think there is a subtle, but important, difference between “euthanasia” and “coup de “grace”. I tried several ways of explaining, but deleted them because I can’t articulate it.
My biggest peeve with the abortion issue is the avoidance of the word “killing”. Abortion is killing. That’s not necessarily a problem. There are a lot of perfectly justified reasons for killing people. There are even more excuses for it. Just be honest about what’s going on.
I say if somebody with absolutely zero financial sense gets appointed as Secretary Of The Treasury, euthanasia might be justified to preserve OUR quality of life.
You’re not wrong. I’ll now pretend I haven’t HEARD the SOT talk.
When some oh-so-compassionate jerk starts nattering on about “defective” and “quality of life”, simply look him/her/it directly in the eye and say clearly “Doctor Stephen Hawking”.
Helen Keller. One of my mentors, who is a polio survivor. The sweet young man with Downs who sacked and carried groceries at a local grocery store and always had a smile and kind word for people.
There was a story out of Wegman’s groceries (which I think are employee owned) about a customer complaining about the bag boy, who had obvious mental and physical issues. Not only did the store stand up for him, the other customers gave her what-for in real time.
The sad thing is that Helen Keller, later in life, argued for the killing of babies as defective. A bit hard to believe, but true.
Our local icon, Brent Carpenter. Lives his best life riding a bike around town honking and waving to people, held a job for years, yet is barely verbal. Carried the torch when the Olympics happened a few hours away a few years back. His mother watched him carry that torch into the stadium to thunderous applause and people chanting his name and whispered, “The doctors told me to abort him and I didn’t listen.”
At least when my brother died I wasn’t in a position of responsibility. And if I had been, I knew his wishes. But this really gets to me.
Speaking as a close family member of one person disabled in the prime of life by a stroke, losing the ability to walk without assistance, entire use of one arm, and clear speech, and of one person with a genetic (?) developmental disability that probably precludes normal social and family life forever, neither one of them wishes they were dead. They struggle on, one a deeply religious person who is going ever deeper into the “problem of suffering” and the nature of redemption, and the other a stoic of classical integrity. No pro-deather will ever be half the human my family members are. Next to my people, I am the luckiest worm in the world.
My dad when he had his stroke. Blood denied to the brain, so classification of stroke. But what it was was occlusion of the carotid arteries. One 100%, the other 90%. Nothing they could do about the fully clogged one. The other? A hail mary procedure. That mom had to make. Odds of survival 5%. High likelihood of material being cleaned out breaking loose and causing a brain artery stroke. He lived another 22 years. Had to risk the procedure again, 10 years later, in addition 4 way heart arterial transplant, and prostrate cancer treatment.
Doctor visit for carotid at 10 years survival went like this: “Need to clean carotid again. But you need to have your heart arteries checked first.” “Yes, you need two bypasses. But you need to check your prostrate.” “Yep. You have prostrate cancer.” Treat prostrate. That comes back clean. Heart artery double bypass, oops quad bypass. Then he goes in to open more the carotid artery. The first incident left him with a withered arm and leg, and blurred speech. He had to relearn many things, and learn how to do things differently, including writing. (When physical therapy got to measuring kitchen appliances his response was “Why? Never did before.” Mom’s follow up was “he is not wrong.”
Did dad get depressed? Yes. How bad mom hid from us girls. Mom plays dirty. She used his mom, her mom, and us girls, to insure that his guilt would pull him out of the depression. That is the least she did to pull him out of depression. She also hid the gun pond key for a long time. If dad had died, he would have been the first child his mother lost. As it was all 6 of her children, and all but one grandchild (spina bifida complications at age 13), outlived grandma. Although one uncle (severely disabled and in nursing home, another story of *survival) followed her not long afterwards.
(* Age 3 onset of severe grand mal seizures. That progressively got worse until grandma could no longer allow him to live at home. He went into a group home initially. Eventually full time nursing home in wheel chair, unresponsive. Grandma insisted he could hear and was responsive to her. Even his siblings were not convinced. But when mom and his next oldest sister went to tell him grandma was gone, he cried. Mom made a point to visit him to feed him lunch like grandma did. Not as often as mom had to work. Dad would go too, but couldn’t physically assist with the feeding, but could hold his brother’s hand and talk to him. No one else was in town.)
I am not exactly rational when it comes to MAiD.
“quality of life” wasn’t an issue until various medical/pharmacological/social interventions became feasible, and then weren’t available to everyone.
Mom is no longer here to ask for the details, so I only have a vague idea of why – but a family that we were close to when I was a child had an EXTREMELY disabled son. IIRC, out of eight. I think now that it was probably a breech, and the placenta had separated to deprive him of oxygen for too long, nothing genetic.
Anyway, confined to a wheelchair. Unable to control ANY movements, could not talk. Had to be fed, diapered, cleaned, etc. his entire life (he was something like twelve when I had contact with him).
That was the STRONGEST and most coherent family I have ever, in my 60+ years, encountered.
If those who say they are for abortion and euthanasia actually cared as much as they pretended to, they’d be crying for mental health assistance for the family of the deceased.
You note they don’t actually care about anyone involved, neither the living nor the dead. They just want to erase that which is inconvenient to them.
Granny Weatherwax warned us: Evil is treating people as things.
Random and OT: what did y’all think of the debate?
It was a farce. I had it on, and watched bits of it, but I could only stand it for short intervals. Mostly I left the sound muted. Biden clearly inhabits an alternate reality that resembles ours only superficially. Nothing coming out of that ancient pie-hole made any sense. The zombie repeated all the same old tired lies that have been disproven for years without the slightest hint of self-awareness.
A proper closing would have been: “Biden’s legacy consists of weakness, incompetence, failure, stupidity and corruption. America is much worse off than we were 4 years ago, and 4 more years of this would be worse than anybody can imagine.”
Now CNN is advertising a poll that shows 33% saying Biden won the debate. I…got nothing. I hope CNN is just lying. I hope there aren’t 33% of anybody anywhere that believe the zombie sock-puppet won that farce of a debate. Unless — maybe they could only get 3 people to answer and one of them was a delusional idiot?
No. Over the next two weeks they’ll spin this into being.
Fox showed some CNN talking heads who the night before were aghast at Biden’s performance, that this morning has them saying stuff 180 degrees from first impressions. Trust me, Fox, very helpfully, showed both. Fox showed what the cameras after the debate, cut away from – Jill having to assist Joe off the stage. He could not maneuver down the stage stairs to meet her at the bottom. Could not do it. His rally after the debate? Which was live. As slack face as when it wasn’t his turn to talk during the debate. Jill, Biden’s handlers, and the lackey media, are all guilty of elderly abuse. Worse, unless he manages to obviously drop dead, and right now I’m thinking “Vacation at Bernie’s” situation, or both houses 25th his ass, which Jill, I mean Mrs. Wilson 2.0, will not allow to happen, he is on the ticket. Right now I just hope that the cheaters from before know they are screwed if they do what they did in 2020. That and the clean up process has happened in enough states that if they don’t, they still lose.
I watched it. All of it. (Also played a lot of solitaire while doing so.) Didn’t watch it live. But I watched it. Trump held it together the entire night. He did not let Biden get away with “Convicted”, turned it neatly back a couple of different ways. Didn’t let him get away with lies, called Biden on it. Made Biden double down. One of the big ones? The border patrol came out and called Biden a liar. Not just wishful thinking. Flat out liar. Vehemently.
Are there idiots out there? Yes. Are there “not Trump no matter what”, out there? I don’t know how you reason with these idiots. I’ve tried the “Trump is our SOB. That is enough.” Doesn’t help.
Another nasty one, which one of the Victory Girls blogger spotted, was the FICUS’s claim that “no serviceman died on MY watch!” OWTTE
Never mind picture of him dozing off, bored, and checking his watch while the dead bodies go past him…
Or that whichever faction was running the Afghanistan campaign as a cheap photo-op killed them via gross negligence.
Whoever was piping in words to say in that rotted out husk of a human being’s ear has a lot to answer for.
A way you could get that poll, is by sampling a list of previously identified likely Biden voters.
The polls have been obviously probably fraudulent, and to be ignored, since I think 2016.
As for the newscasters, they probably are not very tightly wrapped by left standards, or mainstream standards. They probably had to be reminded what the party truth is still.
If we assume that there is a plan, the Democrat’s plan is to kill Biden and Harris. So, they need to fraud Jeffries in as Speaker first.
If we assume no plan, then they are desperately pretending, and are not going to stop until compelled. And maybe not even then.
Biden supporters are not well people, and I am confused why other people would assume that Biden supporters would fold their hands and reorient the way that a well person might.
OMG what a great thread. Good Work Sarah!
I can understand a lot of your positions, but having worked in a nursing home, I’ve also seen a lot of people whose bodies had long outlived their brains. Seeing people whom I remembered as active, able citizens of my town, some of them with enough clout to make their whole political parties jump when they said “frog,” shuffling around as incontinent zombies made me shudder and hope that doesn’t happen to me. I am very glad that Alzheimer’s doesn’t seem to run in my family.
And there was one old man whom I still see when I can’t sleep, in the long watches of the night. He’d been neglected before he got to the home, and had been frozen in a fetal position. From all I could tell, his brain was cottage cheese (all he could do was make a sort of moaning noise every so often) but the question haunted and haunts me: What if he was still fully conscious in there, but unable to communicate or move? Talk about “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream!” If I were a religious person, I would scream and rage at God/the gods, asking “Why do you let him go on like that? Why can’t you take him home?”
If (Heaven forbid!) I were ever in that sort of condition, I would pray for some kindly passing serial killer to finish me off.
There are horrible ways to go. No dispute. But giving someone else the right to decide always ends in eugenics. Always.
So much this. Since we can’t know what is going on inside someone else–especially someone who is entirely non-verbal/immobile–we cannot decide for them. The neglect of such people is appalling, but I think the simple fact that people like the man mentioned are *still alive* says something about how they feel about it. And since we truly have no way of knowing–life is something to be preserved until the Author decides to call them home.
And note, there are cases of recovery from long-term locked in conditions.
(besides the ones that were going to be harvested for organs, I mean- that introduces a motive for malpractice)
They don’t say, “gosh, I wish someone had just killed me.”
They always propose ‘put that person out of their misery,’ and always do ‘put that person out of my misery.’
This haunts me as well. With the staffing crunch, the lockdowns, the deaths of so many seniors who took on these jobs… there aren’t enough people to make the time to read and care for, and hold the hand of, and pray with these people.
It’s horrible.
Which means seen and judged from the outside, the perfect is the enemy of all life.
And in the end the perfection the merchants of death would achieve is the clean perfection of a rock, scrubbed clean of all life, rolling through the loneliness of space forever.
World without end.
This is an almost-perfect summary description of the ultimate big Big Bad Guys of the Liaden stories by Lee and Miller. And, they seek to do it on a truly universal scale, not just a “mere” planet or two. (Spoiler hint, even if they do, there are other universes.)
At one point two characters come across a piece of “Old Tech” from these shereikas and their minions. It tells anyone who touches it to go kill themselves, but by helping others as they go also embrace the sacrament of non-existence… just in case the pure-evil nature of this “gospel” is not yet clear enough.
Incarnated life itself is complicated, dirty, messy, and non-ideal. But it is real and it is real life.
Please note that compared to the above, the Actual Nazis were both pansies and pikers, despite all the cruelty and their carefully-logged megadeaths.
In the end, evil is as evil does, no matter the pretty philosphical wrapping on its deadly poison pill.
Back in the day, when I worked retail management, I worked with a girl who only had one arm. The other arm ended about 6 inches below the elbow and was just a small stump. I remember being amazed because she was absolutely equivalent to me in terms of speed and efficiency in every way, and I was very fast and efficient. She had one arm, but could fold clothes in no time flat. She could take a huge handful of go backs and put them away…with no second hand to place them on the racks. I used to watch her trying to figure out how she did it. She made use of her chin in a way I never did, but other than that, there was no difference in movements or effort from what I did. It was rather astonishing. She never seemed bothered by anything, or even seemed to notice that what she did was in any way different from what everyone else did. I was not the person who hired her, so I don’t know how the interview went to convince the hiring manager nothing would affect her due to her disability, but the truth is, she did everything all the two armed people did with seemingly no extra effort or even noticing it took extra effort. Disability for people who have lived with it all their lives often isn’t a disability at all. It’s just normal.
We will be attending visitation instead of church tomorrow for one of our members. She had her entire colon removed (!), has spent the last two weeks on a ventilator and never regained consciousness after the surgery. The family had to decide whether to pull the plug. Entirely too close to topic…
And re the debate, it’s being reported Biden is meeting with his family this weekend to discuss his campaign. Hmm.
I’ve read, from people who seem positioned to know, that there are only at most two people from whom Brandon will take advice – “Dr.” Jill and (possibly, remote second) Obama, and a disagreement between them goes to Jill without question. And I’d be astonished if Jill the Power-Mad Harpy ever consented to leave the White House voluntarily; the idea that she’d advise dropping out is just Not There. I may wind up being astonished, but I read her as hanging on like grim death, with her teeth and toenails if necessary.
I would not, however, be very surprised if Brandon, Jill and The Cackler were all Arkancided in a Terrible Accident. Or shot (of course) by a declared “MAGA Extremist (TM)” using an “Assault Rifle (TM)” with a bump stock, who was then conveniently “killed while resisting arrest”. 😡
Someone (I think it was El Gato Malo, but not sure) was asking why not nominate Jill Biden. After all, she’s been running things for three years…
The scary thing is, I think that might be sellable. After all, Joe would still be there, still able to offer advice, with less stress. And the entire, “experienced,” WH staff and Cabinet could be retained for, “continuity.”
(Excuse me, I may need to lie down. Queasy, don’t y’know).
That’s a truly horrible thought; now you’ve made me queasy. Misery loves company? 🤢😉
There is only one thought on Biden’s mind. He will not drop out of running voluntarily. Period. Might be the only thing he can say is “I am President!”
Agree about Jill mad-for-power Biden. Also agree about Arkancide. Don’t need to take out madhater Jill, but definitely Joe & Kamala. But OMG sure don’t want to see Jill as Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Jill doesn’t have the class to pull of widowhood.
But whose history will show never had the right to a firearm due to mental illness and was protecting Joe. The type of individual that the left declares right-wing, but the story disappears because the individual was really loony screw loose left.
Yes the story has to be believable. But apparent, life, these days, doesn’t.
The wild card in THAT deck is the Speaker of the House. If the UniParty had been able to time the trickle of RINO resignations so that a Democrat was Speaker, Arkancide would have already happened. They fouled up the timing, and so if Joe and Cackles join the choir eternal, there’s a Republican President to further gum up the works.
If they’d used the KISS principle, they would have had those RINOs stick around to replace him with a Democrat openly. They love them some “cunning plans”, though.
Makes one think that someone is looking out for us. (“God protects the innocent and the USA!” Or whatever the actual quote is.)