A Duty to Die

If, as seems likely in many Western and Asian countries, their populations continue their failure to reproduce themselves at replacement levels and they continue to age and shrink, pressures will mount to cull those who consume resources without producing anything of value to society.

This would be primarily the elderly who require vast sums of money for social security and medicare to maintain lives which have very little future and are of very little use to society at large.

Wesley Smith at the Discovery Institute sees legalization of voluntary euthanasia as the first step. It'd initially be available only to the terminally ill and those in chronic pain. However, once people are allowed to end their lives, Smith argues, it won't be long before they're encouraged to do so, and ultimately social pressure will mount for imposing a duty to die upon those who are a drain on public resources.

Smith quotes from a column published in the Times of London in which former Tory MP Matthew Parris argues that euthanasia/assisted suicide should not only be permitted — but encouraged. In “We Can’t Afford a Taboo on Assisted Dying,” Parris writes:

I can’t dispute the objectors’ belief that once assisted dying becomes normalized we will become more apt to ask yourselves for how much longer we can justify the struggle.

The word “justify” is telling. It does not only concern the suffering of the person who is ill, disabled, or elderly but the suffering that person is supposedly causing to family and society. Parris believes that, eventually, for such a person to continue to live will be considered unjustifiable:

Is life still giving us more pleasure than pain? How much is all this costing relatives and the health service? How much of a burden are we placing on those who love us? How much of a burden are we placing on ourselves? . . .

If assisted dying becomes common and widely accepted, hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — will consider choosing this road when the time comes, and in some cases, even ask themselves whether it would be selfish not to. . .

Within a decade or more [assisted suicide] will be seen as a normal road for many to take, and be considered socially responsible — and even, finally, urged upon people.

In other words, the creation of a “duty to die.”

Parris sees the future as a war between the old and sick and the young and healthy based on the cost of caring for people with dementia, disabilities, and serious illnesses:

This [resource] imbalance helps explain the government’s desperate reliance on immigration — to the rage of electorates who won’t face the fundamental question: how are our economies going to pay for the ruinously expensive overhang that dare not speak its name: old age and infirmity?

Not everyone desires this end, Smith acknowledges, but it's the logical endpoint of legalizing euthanasia. Once it's legal, it'll become acceptable and once it's acceptable it'll become the responsible thing to do.

Once that point is reached it'll be just a short step to making it an obligation for those who are a "burden" on everybody else to just shuffle off this mortal coil.