A Matter of Life and Death

WASHINGTON, DC, Jan 9 — He’s back and he’s doubling down on his bet that the human earthlings don’t have long to live. Who is he? None other than 90-year-old biologist Paul Ehrlich. He’s the guy who, in 1968, predicted that hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in the ensuing decade. And then, in 1970, he warned that “all important animal life” in the seas of earth would be extinct in 10 years. A year later, in 1971, he said things had gotten so bad that “I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

Ehrlich made something of a comeback on New Year’s Day when he appeared on the CBS show, 60 Minutes, that night, declaring, yet again that: “humanity is not sustainable. To maintain our lifestyle (yours and mine, basically) for the entire planet, you’d need five more Earths. Not clear where they’re gonna come from. Resources that would be required, the systems that support our daily life, which of course are the biodiversity that we’re wiping out. Humanity is very busily sitting on a limb that we’re sawing off.”

Mark Hendrickson is a noted economist and a prolific author who recently penned a commentary for The Epoch Times about the “Environment, Population, and Capitalism.” As he put it, “Ehrlich’s theory of a catastrophic population explosion and deadly ever-increasing environmental degradation, have proven spectacularly wrong. Those doom-and-gloom theories grossly underestimated the resilience, adaptability, and common sense of human beings.”

Not everyone in the TV audience was dismayed by Ehrlich’s prediction of humankind’s hopeless annihilation, but it’s a good guess that if certain members of the Canadian government were watching, they got a boost for their efforts to expand assisted suicide and euthanasia in their country. According to Reuters, more than 30,000 Canadians were put to death with medical assistance over the past six years.  Apparently that was not enough because the news service reports that the government wants to expand assisted suicide throughout the country “to become one of the broadest” such programs in the world. 

The expansion would include so-called “mature minors” as young as 12 years old and that can be particularly dangerous. The National Institutes of Health tell us that “anxiety disorders and suicidality (ideation, plans, attempts, and completed suicide) are both major public health issues in youth: anxiety disorders are among the most common childhood psychological disorders and suicide is among the leading causes of death in children and adolescents.”

Currently, 11 countries permit assisted suicide: Canada, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Colombia, Austria, New Zealand, Spain, and Australia. As for the U.S., assisted suicide is legal in California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Montana, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon (the earliest, from 1997), Vermont and Washington.

Proponents of assisted suicide argue that we each have a right to do what we will with our lives.  We are freeborn and we can choose whether we live or die. Opponents point out that society has an obligation to respect human life. It’s easy for someone — at any age — to say “I don’t want to live anymore” for whatever the reason. The question is, does society have the right to fulfill that wish.    

A dissertation entitled “Assisted Suicide: A right or a wrong?” by Manuel Velasquez and Claire Andre at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University explained that “If assisted suicide is allowed on the basis of mercy or compassion, what will keep us from ‘assisting in’ and perhaps actively urging, the death of anyone whose life we deem worthless or undesirable? What will keep the inconvenienced relatives of a patient from persuading him or her to ‘voluntarily’ ask for death? What will become of people who, once having signed a request to die, later change their minds, but, because of their conditions, are unable to make their wishes known? And, once we accept that only life of a certain quality is worth living, where will we stop? When we devalue one life, we devalue all lives. Who will speak for the severely handicapped infant or the senile woman?”

John Grimaldi served on the first non-partisan communications department in the New York State Assembly and is a founding member of the Board of Directors of Priva Technologies, Inc. He has served for more than thirty years as a Trustee of Daytop Village Foundation, which oversees a worldwide drug rehabilitation network.