When assisted suicide is just banal (Erin)

I see that Rod has beat me to the sad story of Sir Edward Downes and his wife; I'd still like to point out this thoughtful blog post written yesterday by the UK Telegraph's Richard Preston:

We've just finished our afternoon leader conference at the Telegraph, in which there was passionate discussion about the deaths of the conductor Sir Edward Downes and his wife at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.

Several of us found ourselves troubled by our reactions on hearing the news this morning, or rather our lack of reaction: "Heard of him ... Dignitas? ... Another one gone? ... Oh well ..." The fact is that there has been such a procession of the troubled and ill to Zurich in the past couple of years that the news of another two souls dispatched with the help of the Dignitas staff is, in itself, unremarkable.

Why should this be so? It must have something to do with the benign name Dignitas, its grim appropriation of the word "clinic", and the fact that its staff are virtually anonymous (I've had to look up Dignitas to remember that its founder was a lawyer called Ludwig Minelli). The process is unsensational, banal. For better or worse, we are getting used to the idea that we can be terminated at a time of our choosing.

Preston goes on to mention how people used to react to Dr. Jack Kevorkian's work, and contrast that with the lack of reaction today to news of assisted suicide. I think he has a good point: what was once almost unthinkable and horrific is becoming, as Preston says, banal, the sort of thing that barely elicits any reaction at all.

And if you are not a believer, if you see man as nothing more than an accumulation of carbon who is every moment gathering pain as he heads inexorably toward oblivion, then the lack of outcry at the news of someone's act of euthanasia probably pleases you. I can understand that--but what I can't understand are those who wish to reconcile euthanasia with faith, particularly Christian faith. So far, Christians who openly support physician assisted suicide or other forms of euthanasia remain in the minority, but there are some who advance the argument that euthanasia is compatible with Christianity--and there are others who have adopted a "personally opposed, but..." line of argument which promises to do as much to prevent euthanasia as that argument did to reduce abortion.

Creating a culture in which physician assisted suicide is seen as an acceptable way out for anyone who chooses to avail himself of this "exit strategy" is bound to have an impact. We can look at England to see what a culture looks like when it has reached the point where the reaction to the news of a prominent person's choice of euthanasia is the equivalent of a shrug. Here in America, those who oppose euthanasia on moral grounds may still have time to be heard on the subject, though thoughtful arguments against self-destruction are often dismissed out of hand because they draw their inspiration from a notion of man and his inherent dignity which has completely gone out of fashion.