All

The scholar M. D. Aeschliman wrote an essay for First Things last month occasioned by the republication of a little-known 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed. I had not previously heard of this dystopian novel, and Aeschliman’s description drew me to read it: “In the fictional society of The Wanting Seed, abortion, homosexuality, and disdain for the family have become ascendant and are politically privileged.” Because, in the future Burgess imagines, overpopulation has overwhelmed the world’s resources, the state punishes any woman who has more than one child; even if a child dies, a mother is not to have another. This being a work by the author of A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed is unsurprisingly dark, mordantly funny, and written in a richly vivid style that somehow accustoms his readers, without their recoiling, even to scenes of cannibalism as the society appears to collapse. Imagine Evelyn Waugh dropping acid and writing science fiction.

Burgess’s novel got me thinking that a thread running through all dystopias is the totalitarian state’s invasion of every kind of human love (all four loves, as C. S. Lewis might remark). This is true of friendship (philia), familial affection (storgē), and of course charity (agapē), but especially of eros, the love that is fruitful and multiplies. Burgess’s overpopulated state has a Ministry of Infertility—until the cycle of cannibalistic anarchy drives it to drop its prefix and become, at least for the time being, the Ministry of Fertility. To have siblings verges on the scandalous; large families are unheard of; being homosexual is so advantageous to one’s career that one major character pretends to be gay to get ahead.

The all-powerful state’s control of eros is a feature of what is generally considered the first twentieth-century dystopia, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. First published in the 1920s, We depicts a society in which people are known by numbers, not names, and in which every building is made of glass so that there is no privacy. Yet each citizen lives alone. There are no marriages, only couplings prearranged in one’s Sexual Table (during which a shade may be decently lowered over the glass wall of one’s apartment). There are no families: the One State, governing a small remnant of the world’s previous population after a devastating war, takes charge of the rearing of all children. We’s narrator-protagonist, D-503, becomes involved with a mysterious, rebellious woman, I-330, and his yearning for her is a kind of rediscovery of long-suppressed nature. Spoiler alert for those who have not read the book: it does not end well for either of them.

George Orwell is said to have been influenced by Zamyatin’s novel in writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, and inasmuch as Orwell’s Oceania is a totalitarian surveillance state, that influence is evident. Unlike Zamyatin’s One State, there are marriages and families in Oceania, but it quickly becomes apparent that the state rigidly controls all relationships, at least among party members (the “proles” can live as they like). Why else must Winston Smith, who is married but separated and childless, and his lover Julia Worthing, a single woman belonging to the Junior Anti-Sex League, resort to secrecy and deception in order to be together? Does the state care about extramarital sexual relations? Probably not as such; what it wants is complete knowledge and control of every kind of relationship. True, Winston and Julia talk privately about how much they hate Big Brother and would like to join a rebellion against his authority, but it is their meeting in private alone that is their first offense against public order.

In Sandra Newman’s 2023 novel Julia, a retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four from the titular character’s perspective, the Party’s control of eros among its members is an even more prominent feature. In Newman’s tale, Julia Worthing becomes a serial seductress in the employ of the Inner Party mastermind O’Brien, luring not only Winston Smith but two of his co-workers at the Ministry of Truth into affairs in the same dingy upstairs room in a prole district. Julia and Winston are not simply found out by the Thought Police, as in Orwell’s story; she is his knowing betrayer, though she pays a price as heavy as his own.

Newman’s shift of our perspective to Julia rather than Winston enables her to add some features to life in Oceania that are not in Orwell’s book but are consistent with it. The young women in the dormitories of the Anti-Sex League, like Julia, are evidently pledged not to marry, but are eligible to go to a clinic for Artsem—artificial insemination—and thus contribute their offspring to be reared by the state. A select few are even chosen for the Big Future program, to be impregnated by the (purported) seed of Big Brother himself, and given a badge to wear in public announcing the honor that has been bestowed on them. (It is an open secret, however, that single women in the Anti-Sex League sometimes go for Artsem as cover for a pregnancy that has already begun.)

A very different kind of control over eros and reproduction is central to Margaret Atwood’s 1986 novel The Handmaid’s Tale. In Atwood’s dystopian Gilead, a substantial part of North America, a pseudo-Christian, male-dominated tyranny deals with a crisis of infertility by enslaving fertile young women as “handmaids” to the ruling class, to bear the children that cannot be borne by the wives of Gilead’s “commanders.” (To my fellow Christians and conservatives who know Atwood’s book only by reputation, I should say: Never mind the enormous popularity of the book [and of its television adaptation] among progressives for its dark view of a kind of “Christian nationalism,” which is the book’s weakest feature; it is nonetheless a very well told tale.) Each handmaid is a precious broodmare, too important to the society’s future to be given any freedom at all to marry, to raise her own children, to go where she pleases, dress as she likes, live as she likes, even to have her own name. So few and valuable are these handmaids that only a high-status man can have one in his household.

Swinging in quite the opposite direction is This Perfect Day, a 1970 novel by Ira Levin (better known for Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, among other books). Like Burgess, Levin imagines a world in which the problem is controlling population growth; unlike The Wanting Seed, This Perfect Day depicts a one-world government that has pretty much solved the problem. A single great computer, Unicomp, runs everything, and its subjects are told what their job will be, where in the world they will do it, whether they may marry and have children—and how long they will live: at age sixty-two, each person is quietly euthanized. Individuals not permitted to marry have girlfriends or boyfriends, but with no possibility of procreation. Every month each person goes for a “treatment,” an injection cocktail of contraceptives, vaccinations against disease, and psychoactive drugs to control mood, disposition, ambition, and curiosity. Regular meetings with one’s “adviser” help to monitor whether any adjustment is necessary in one’s treatments.

Where Burgess and Levin give us overpopulation as the rationale for tyranny, and Zamyatin and Atwood give us underpopulation as its cause, the totalitarian state in Orwell and Newman’s Oceania seems to be both the effect and the cause of endless war. The state’s external enemies serve as justification for its relentless hunt for its internal enemies. But the upshot for the erotic relations of human beings is the same in principle in every case. No one’s loves are his or her own; even the dearest thing of which we say “mine,” another person whose good is identical to our own, is placed beyond our reach, prevented from being really ours.

 

Nowhere is this sundering of natural loves more central to a dystopian story than in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In the World State, in the year A.F. (After Ford) 632, promiscuity is an ethical expectation, attachment to one person is suspect, babies are gestated entirely in laboratories, children are raised in state nurseries, and the word “mother” is an obscenity. The benign tyranny of empty pleasures, with its cinema “feelies” and the ubiquitous drug “soma,” is the state’s chosen means of control not in order to reduce population or to increase it. Nor is this an Orwellian state at war, its boot stamping on the faces of its own citizens in a desperate bid for order and loyalty. Huxley’s society seems to have achieved a perfect stasis, a status quo of bred-to-purpose class hierarchy with a stable population, and war has apparently been eliminated. Here there is sex but no love; there are co-workers and castes but no friends or families; there are pleasures but no passions, and soma to chase the blues away.

These dystopias—each of which is challenged by characters who glimpse what has been taken from them—raise a question about utopias as well. Is any political order that strives to straighten the crooked timber of humanity once and for all bound to rob us of love?

The answer seems to be yes. I have written elsewhere of the strong affinity of Huxley’s Brave New World to Plato’s Republic. As I read Plato, the “city in speech” described by Socrates is a fantastically ironic project, each outlandish proposition outdoing the previous one. When one reaches the fifth book of the dialogue, one finds Socrates arguing that, for the sake of their total dedication to the city, the guardian class must be deprived of all “mine and thine”—stripped of all property, all privacy; to have no spouses of their own, no children of their own, nothing that can rival their love of the city they govern and defend. It’s quite mad, and there is every indication that Plato knows it is. The reasons given at each step of the argument seem sound; but human lives and human communities are not amenable to being organized into perfect order by abstract reason. Our need for one another—for particular others—cannot be suppressed without unbearable cost.

This is evident, finally, even in the work that gave the genre its name, Thomas More’s Utopia. A subtle and ingenious work with clear debts to Plato, Utopia gives us milder instances of the same tyrannical meddling in natural human loves. Utopians all wear the same drab clothes; the doors of homes have no locks; meals are taken not at home but in common dining halls; after several years families are compelled to change houses, and meanwhile, those with too many children send their excess offspring to homes with too few. All this is by way of attenuating people’s attachment to things, places, and even persons we will claim as peculiarly our own. True, marital fidelity is very strictly enforced; but before any marriage, each spouse is shown completely naked to the other, just as we would expect the saddle and blanket to be removed when we are “buying a colt.” (A pretty shocking idea in the Christendom of 1516.)

It seems the utopian impulse and the dystopian nightmare are never very distant from one another. If we are to love Big Brother, as Winston Smith does at the end of Orwell’s novel, all our other loves must be intruded upon, damaged, even sacrificed entirely. The case for freedom begins with the case for love.

Image by fantom_rd and licensed via Adobe Stock.

Onec again, we are grateful to Mr Robert Keim for sharing some of his writing with us, this time in a two part article on the subject of the liturgical use of bells. Mr Keim is a secular brother of the London Oratory of St. Philip Neri, a linguist, and a literary scholar specializing in the poetic and dramatic literature of the English Renaissance. A longtime student of the arts and spirituality Gregory DiPippohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295638279418781125noreply@blogger.com0

Hello Dear Ladies at home and those who want to be,I hope to be back with a broadcast soon.I have had my devises all updated and a grandson has corrected the camera-cutting-off problem. He is going to Greece next week with a Bible School so I have been absorbed in preparing Greek style food during his stay here. It’s so delightful that he likes audiobooks of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell. He Lydiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15530969871397361970noreply@blogger.com0

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Kevin Yuill
Kevin Yuill, who is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Sunderland and CEO of Humanists Against Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (HAASE) was published in Spiked on April 18, 2024 is asking the question: Why are Dutch doctors euthanising healthy young women?

Yuill begins his article by telling the stories of Yolanda Fun and Zoraya ter Beek:

Alex Schadenberg
Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

I have great news. The California assisted suicide expansion bill (SB 1196) has been pulled. 

This is great news, but let's be clear, the language of SB 1196 is the goal of the assisted suicide lobby but the bill was determined to have gone too far too fast.

Based on the summary of SB 1196 by Senator Blakespear I stated that the bill would have:

1. Allowed euthanasia by IV (intravenous), as in Canada. Currently, California permits assisted suicide (lethal poison that a person takes orally at the time and place of their own choosing, with or without witnesses). This bill allowed for death by IV. This constitutes euthanasia/homicide.
2. Changed the criteria from terminally ill (6 month prognosis) to the Canadian model: “a grievous and irremediable medical condition.” Thus, there would be no time limit  and no terminal illness requirement.
3. Allowed people with early to mid-stage dementia to consent to assisted suicide or euthanasia, even though they have a condition that impairs their capacity to consent.
4. Removed the California residency requirement. California would join Oregon and Vermont, dropping their residency requirements and allowing for suicide tourism.
5. Removed the 2031 sunset clause in the California assisted suicide law.

I published an article on March 18, 2024, stating that the California bill would legalize medical killing. After the language of SB 1196 was released I further explained how SB 1196 would have expanded medical killing in California.

SB 1196 would have changed the law from requiring ingesting of the lethal poison to utilizing the lethal poison. Utilize was not defined in the bill but it could be defined as: "to make practical and effective use of."

SB 1196 would have changed the law from requiring a terminal disease to a grievous and irremediable medical condition.

Terminal disease was based on a 6 month prognosis whereas grievous and irremediable medical condition had a long definition that essentially mean't that the person has a serious chronic condition that will continue to decline.

The bill stated:  

For purposes of this part, a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” includes a diagnosis of early to mid-stage dementia while the individual still has the capacity to make medical decisions. 

IV catheter
How would early to mid-state dementia have been defined in practise?

SB 1196 permitted non-doctors to participate in the law. SB 1196 added the following: nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and registered nurses.

SB 1196 removed the residency requirement in the California law by striking out the words - is a resident of California.

SB 1196 allowed the use of an IV (intravenous) catheter to "utilize" the poison. SB 1196 stated:  

death through ingestion, or through an intravenous pathway after a health care provider places an intravenous catheter if one was not already placed, to bring about the qualified individual’s own death. 

This statement did not limit the use of the IV catheter to assisted suicide and may have allowed for euthanasia/homicide.

Later SB 1196, stated:  

For purposes of this section, “assisting the qualified individual by preparing the aid-in-dying drug” includes a health care provider placing an intravenous catheter, so long as the health care provider does not assist the qualified individual in introducing the aid-in-dying drug into the qualified individual’s vein.

This statement inferred that the person must somehow utilize the IV catheter. The IV could be placed but the health care provider could not "assist". This was intentionally confusing. There may also have been circumstances, such as ALS, where the person has difficulty "utilizing" the IV catheter without assistance.

On June 22, 2022, a California federal judge rejected a case designed to permit euthanasia within California's assisted suicide act. Shavelson, a doctor that solely focuses on assisting suicide and Sandra Morris, who had ALS, argued that the state's assisted suicide law discriminated against people who had difficulty self-ingesting the lethal drugs and to remedy the situation the state needed to permit euthanasia in those cases.

In that case, Shavelson argued that allowing the administration of lethal drugs by IV catheter when a person has difficulty self-administering the lethal drugs was necessary. Justice Chhabria rejected the argument and stated:

Chhabria ruled the case could not proceed on the theory that it violates the ADA because the accommodation they seek would cross the boundary created by the End of Life Option Act, “from the ability to end your own life to the ability to have someone else end it for you.”Chhabria further ruled:
“Such an accommodation would ‘compromise' the essential nature of the act, and would therefore fundamentally alter the program.’”

The judge said the law’s self-administration requirement is the “final safeguard” to ensure the act remains voluntary.

“A person seeking to end their life pursuant to the act can opt out at any point — after requesting or receiving the prescription, after the drugs are in their hand, after the feeding tube has been installed, after saying goodbye,” he wrote. “The accommodation that the plaintiffs seek would significantly undermine these protections by opening a window during which there would be no way of knowing whether the patient had changed their mind.”

If SB 1196 would have changed the California law by removing self-administer, removing the terminal illness requirement and allowing the utilization of an IV catheter, these changes would make it impossible to distinguish between an act of assisted suicide and an act of euthanasia/homicide. 

Assisted suicide is receiving lethal poison and self-administer it for the purpose of causing death.

Euthanasia is when another person, usually a medical professional, administers the lethal poison for the purpose of causing death. Euthanasia is a form of homicide/murder.

Since SB 1196 did not require a "third/independent party" to witness the act, therefore SB 1196 would have enable euthanasia under the guise of assisted suicide and achieve for the euthanasia lobby what was denied to them by Justice Chhabria in 2022.

SB 1196 was a "Trojan horse" euthanasia bill.

SB 1196 is the end goal of the assisted suicide lobby.

The crucifix is an incredible reminder of Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection, which are all central aspects of the Catholic faith.

But have you noticed that the crucifix is not the universal symbol of Christianity? A simple cross is.

Among the many differences between Catholics and Protestants is the use of a crucifix or cross.

The crucifix includes the crucified Christ, whereas a plain cross is empty.

The presence of a crucifix remains a notable distinction between a Catholic parish and a Christian worship space or chapel.

Msgr. Charles Pope provided some background in his answer on Our Sunday Visitor:

“What likely began among Protestants as a simple preference for simplicity developed into a certain theological stance by some who used the plain cross to emphasize that Jesus had risen and was ‘no longer nailed to a cross.’ To many of them, the cross was now empty and our renditions of it should look that way. Some went so far as to say that Catholics thought Jesus was still on the cross. This, of course, is not true. We are fully aware and solemnly confess every Sunday in the Creed that Jesus is risen from the dead and sits in glory at the Father’s right hand. The crucifix is a depiction of the event of the Passion of our Savior, Jesus, a once, for all and perfect sacrifice (cf. Heb 10:14) that reaches across time but is accomplished.“The use of a crucifix (not a simple cross) is mandated in the Catholic liturgy and of both the processional and altar crucifixes. This is because holy Mass makes present the crucifixion of Jesus.”

Some Protestants see this difference as deeply troubling– a sign that Catholics dismiss the resurrection or want to “keep Jesus on the cross.”

However, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Instead, as Catholics, we focus on the complete story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. We proclaim Christ crucified (1 Cor. 1:23).

Mary Beth Kremski from Catholic Answers offered her perspective on the matter:

“Does the Catholic Church cling to the crucifix because it would rather avoid the resurrection? Consider this: My Protestant church celebrated Easter for one day. The Catholic Church celebrates Easter for 50 days—not including each Sunday of the year, which are seen as 'little' Easters. The Mass never fails to proclaim the resurrection of Christ. And the Church’s daily prayer, the Liturgy of the Hours, is filled with Scripture and prayers rejoicing in the resurrection.The idea that the Catholic Church downplays the resurrection is so obviously erroneous that anyone can unmask this misconception with only minor effort. But my fellow Protestants and I hadn’t made that effort. Instead, we professed to know the answers before we asked the questions.”

Here is a brief history of the crucifix from Catholic News Agency:

“In difficult moments, I will fix my gaze upon the silent Heart of Jesus stretched on the Cross, and from the exploding flames of His merciful Heart, will flow down upon me power and strength to keep fighting.” – St. Faustina

The upcoming annual Balikatan military exercise will include an area in the South China Sea that is claimed by China, as well as an area not far from Taiwan. The Philippines wants peace and development in the Indo-Pacific despite tensions fuelled by Beijing.

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Meghan Schrader
Meghan is an autistic person who is an instructor at E4 - University of Texas (Austin) and an EPC-USA board member.

I am commenting on the cases of the young women with autism, ADHD, depression and Borderline Personality Disorder who are planning to have their lives ended in Canada and the Netherlands from the perspective of someone who also has autism, ADHD and depression. I am not a psychologist and I’ve never met either person, but I will do my best to share insights about those situations based on my own experiences.

The cases strike me as presenting a lot of issues so this article is long. The issues that stick out to me are the devastation a person might feel when they are told that their mental health conditions can never improve, the abusiveness of that advice, the right to die movement’s flippant attitude toward death, the nature of true friendship, the autistic tendency to fixate, and the complex experience of autonomy that occurs when a autistic adult lives with their parents.

I’ll start with the 28-year-old woman in Belgium with autism, BPD and depression. Ter Beek’s situation makes me think of two issues, one being the euthanasia movement’s flippant approach to death and the potential inaccuracy or hubris of doctors who dole out mental health diagnoses. Ter Beek was told that she could never get better, which is something I’ve been told during my struggles with treatment resistant depression, at my lowest moments after multiple futile hospitalizations and medication trials. Hearing those predictions was gutting, and I understand why some people who get that kind of prognosis might feel motivated to have their lives ended.

But just giving up on a patient and suggesting that they die is abusive. It’s common for clinicians to arrogantly dole out demoralizing predictions to disabled people that would make anyone fearful of the future; and that can certainly contribute to the conclusion that one should die. I’ll never forget one counsellor at a partial hospitalization program who barely knew me, but took it upon herself to announce to me that the combination of my learning disability, autism spectrum disorder and depression was so disabling that I would never work and would have to live in a group home for the rest of my life. (That’s not true; now I live in an apartment and work at a job I love.) A medical system or physician who tells people, “you’ll never get better; maybe you should kill yourself” is doling out an even more arrogant and abusive recommendation.

It’s worth noting that dark predictions of things never getting better fit into a pattern of people with Borderline Personality Disorder struggling to access adequate care. People with BPD are more likely to have clinicians give up on them because of stereotypes about people with BPD, because people with BPD have a higher incidence of suicide, and because the symptoms of BPD sometimes make the person difficult to interact with (Link to article). But, recovery from BPD is very possible; in fact, the woman who developed Dialectical Behavior Therapy, the gold standard treatment for BPD, had the disorder herself (Link to article). I have a colleague at my job who has BPD, and she’s now living her best life, doing wonderful work with our students. There’s also evidence that the symptoms of BPD, which can be very acute in a person’s twenties, decline with age. (Link to article) So, often clinicians assume that people with BPD are bad or unfixable people, but it’s just not true. People with BPD can effectively manage their condition and lead meaningful, happy lives (Link to a book on the topic).

Another thing that stood out to me when I looked at the article about Ter Beek is the euthanasia movement’s trivialization of death. Now, a mentor who provided feedback on this article pointed out to me that people have many different ways of processing what death is. He commented: 

“Many might argue that fear is not the only appropriate or even “reasonable” response. Many religious systems perceive death as a step toward eternal life, and other think of death as ‘not being,’ that is as potentially neutral as being, perhaps within the will/power of divine order that transcends us.” 

Zoraya ter Beek
Fair enough, but I still think that the right to die movement is trivializing the harm of death. In the interview she did for the Free Press, Ter Beek says that she’s a little scared to die, but the picture of her accompanying the article has her looking sanguine in a way that reminds me of someone who is modelling clothing; she refers to the urn her ashes will be kept in as “my new house;” as though being a pile of ashes kept in a urn on someone’s desk is the equivalent of buying a condo (Link to article). This description of death indicates an unverifiable certainty that death is a doorway to something good. The right to die movement’s current activities are as though many of the proponents have inured themselves to the concept that death is the great unknown and that dead people are lowered into graves where their bodies are eaten by worms. I think that if Canadian and Netherlands culture treated death with more reticence and a less like a trip to some amazing wonderland of delight, the choice to be dead might not seem so appealing to disabled people who are signing up for euthanasia.

Now I’ll move on to the the young woman in Canada with autism and ADHD, MV. The thing that sticks out to me the most is that she lives with her parents, and as someone who lived with my parents on and off in my twenties, I know that that can be a complex and potentially difficult experience for everyone involved, even when everyone is trying their best and loves each other very much. So, I’ll consider how I think that situation might be impacting MV’s “MAiD” request.

First of all, we live in a culture that highly prizes autonomy and expects adult children to move out of their parents house, and I’m wondering if that’s making the experience of living with her parents seem intolerable to MV (Link to an article). But, complete independence is not the only valuable or valid conception of autonomy to operate from. In the Latino culture (Link to article) it is common for multiple generations of a family to live in the same house far into adulthood. (Link to article).

Hence, I think it might help MV to consider that the Latino culture and disability justice culture emphasize interdependence-autonomy with help from others in the context of supportive relationships. Disability Studies professor Paul Longmore put the difference between mainstream Western conceptions of autonomy and the disability justice movement’s general approach to autonomy as follows:

“For example, some people with disabilities have been affirming the validity of values drawn from their own experience. Those values are markedly different from, and even opposed to, nondisabled majority values. They declare that they prize not self-sufficiency but self-determination, not independence but interdependence, not functional separateness but personal connection, not physical autonomy but human community. This values-formation takes disability as the starting point. It uses the disability experience as the source of values and norms. The affirmation of disabled values also leads to a broad-ranging critique of non- disabled values. American culture is in the throes of an alarming and dangerous moral and social crisis, a crisis of values. The disability movement can advance a much-needed perspective on this situation, It can offer a critique of the hyperindividualistic majority norms institutionalized in the medical model and at the heart of the contemporary American crisis.” (Link to article) So, if I could talk to MV, I would tell her that there’s no need to be ashamed that she lives with her family just because that’s not what most adults in Canada do; plenty of competent, fulfilled adults in this world do the same thing. In a way, those of us disabled adults who live with family are rebels living in a way that is counter-cultural, and that cultural deviance really isn’t a bad thing.

However, I also know that being a disabled adult child living in your parents house can sort of feel like you are stuck in a state of perpetual adolescence, and that this can cause a person to feel repressed. When I was living with my parents I was grateful for their support, but I wasn’t able to have the level of autonomy that I think most twenty-somethings want, and we sometimes struggled to communicate effectively about what each one of us needed. There were a lot of times when I found my parents well-meaning advice intensely grating or that they found various everyday behaviors of mine disruptive. That situation led to some very demoralizing conflict; being “roomates” with your parents can make some daily interactions start to feel like fingers on a blackboard, even if those family relationships are very loving.

My choice to move to Texas in my mid-thirties was also a good one. My parents and I are still very close, but they have more space to have time together as a couple and I have more room to say, “No, I don’t want to do that,” or, “I, Meghan Schrader the independent disabled adult, want help with thing A, but not thing B.”

Given my own experiences, I’m wondering if MV’s desire to die by “MAiD” is at least partially motivated by an attempt to assert autonomy in a situation where she isn’t experiencing autonomy in other domains of her life. Is there perhaps another family member or friend who she could live with for a while, who could provide support for her disability and would provide the same level of encouragement for her to live, but with whom she might feel a greater sense of autonomy? Would that make her feel as though she has better adult choices to look forward to? One thing that I think would’ve helped me in my 20s is going to a treatment facility for people with clinical depression; is that the kind of thing that MV might be willing to do that might give her a break from her environment? Perhaps MV could go on a long retreat somewhere? If a change in MV’s living situation isn’t possible right now, are there other ways that she could have more opportunities to make choices about her daily routine, establish clearer boundaries with others and direct the course of her life? (Link to a book on this topic). 

Of course, as I’ve said, I am not a member of this family and I don’t know what’s going on in their everyday lives; MV struggling to assert herself in a situation where she isn’t getting other opportunities to assert autonomy is just the kind of thing that I think might be going on based on my own experience.

However, although giving MV more autonomy in general strikes me as potentially helping to alleviate her desire to die, MV’s Dad’s statement that MV is “obsessed” with MAiD and that the obsession is related to her autism and ADHD strikes me as providing important insight into how she is experiencing the conclusion that she should die by “MAiD,” and that these dynamics complicate her experience of autonomy. An article on the situation reads:

“The wrinkle, and perhaps the tragedy, in this case is that the woman, identified only as MV, has autism and ADHD, lives with her parents and has never had an independent life. Her father, identified as WV, argued that her condition is mental, not physical, so she doesn’t qualify for MAID under current law. Her condition, he said, led to her being “obsessed” with MAID.” (Link to article). I think some people might read that statement as a parent erroneously and paternalistically painting an adult autistic child as lacking agency, but I can say from experience that the autistic tendency to fixate is a real thing. This hyper focus is even more intense in those of us who also have ADHD, and that hyper-focus can sometimes make it difficult to break out of irrational or destructive thinking patterns (Link to article). In that case the person is not “incompetent,” but the fixation distorts the person’s ability to think through all the facts about whatever they are fixated on, sort of like if the person were mildly intoxicated (Link to image). A family member’s efforts to prevent a loved one from making a choice based on those thinking patterns are not “paternalistic,” it’s the family member being loving and responsible. Or, that’s been my experience.

For instance, MV’s intent to die by “MAiD” reminds me a little bit of some of the decisions I’ve made in the context of symptoms of body dysmorphic disorder. I’m going to withhold the details, but a couple of times I’ve made choices related to perceptual distortions from that disorder that my parents strongly urged me not to make, and I could have saved us all a lot of suffering if I had listened to them, even though I’m an independent adult who can make her own choices. I also made some important vocational decisions in my late teens and early twenties that my parents strongly advised against, and in my thirties I came to deeply regret not following their advice.

But, at least I lived to regret those mistakes and move on with my life. This young woman is presumably fixated on the idea that killing herself isn’t really so bad. Unfortunately, the fact that she’s reached that conclusion is sort of understandable in the same way that some of the ways I’ve handled body dysmorphic disorder are understandable. Western culture inundates us with ideas about what is attractive in a similar way that Canadian & Netherlands culture romanticize “MAiD.” So, “MAiD” has been presented as just another choice, and that’s a sad combination with the fixation that is more typical for those of us on the spectrum.

I think I remember reading somewhere that someone urged MV to die by “MAiD,” and that makes me very sad. It reminds me of a terrible experience I had in my early 20s when a close friend of 20 years suddenly started treating me horribly because that’s what her new boyfriend urged her to do. It was deeply wounding to have one of my best childhood friends, with whom I had shared some of the happiest times of my life, turn on me in that way, and the eventual dissolution of that friendship caused desperate loneliness. The friend who is urging MV to kill herself is abusing MV in a similar way. Urging someone to end their life is not the mark of a true and caring friend, this is a mark of someone living out their appetite for destruction by pushing someone else toward destruction. In fact, a young woman in Massachusetts served time in jail for encouraging her boyfriend to end his life. (Link to article).

My hope for MV is that she is eventually able to find better friends who will truly love and support her, like a close mentor of mine who lives near my current apartment and generously serves as a listening ear, a lunch partner and problem-solver for me. I also found it helpful to get involved with the local chapter of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network; is there a Canadian chapter of ASAN or a similar group that MV could get involved with where she could experience comaraderie with other people who have disabilities, such as one of the groups that signed this letter opposing the extension of assisted suicide to people with disabilities in 2021? (Link to article)

The last thing MV’s situation causes me to reflect on is the euthanasia movement’s privileging of personal choice above all else. In respect to MV’s intent to die, the original trial judge wrote that: 

this choice “goes to the core of her being. An injunction would deny MV the right to choose between living and dying with dignity.” 

The judge’s logic shows just how cold the euthanasia agenda is; he was denying the woman’s father the opportunity to intervene to save their daughter because the impending suicide was a choice. Canada’s “MAiD” program’s operation from that logic shows that the right to die movement treats choice as something that can never be questioned, no matter the consequences: MV’s decision to kill herself with “MAiD” is a choice, so that choice must be carried out and MV’s parents should just stand there while someone injects poison into her arm.

A culture that privileges a “choice” facilitated by state-employed doctors over instincts of family and the efforts of parents to prevent their children from being killed is an empty one. Unfortunately, the politically powerful euthanasia movement values the right to be made dead more than the deepest bonds of love and care. My hope is that MV and Ter Beek will find the love and care that they need to move beyond the desire to die and achieve something much better for themselves.

You will say I am easily angered by Francis. I will reply that it is more so, that Francis is extremely angering. One of the traits of the man I can stand the least is his taking the right people and abusing them to propagate the wrong message. The last example is Saint Pius X. […]

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