England and Scotland await the decisive vote on the proposal. An intrinsically losing response that hits our resignation to the old age of freedom. Inside a discussion that floats between the prayers of confessional religions, legislative proposals and crusades on the point of law
The Netherlands fares a little better, in percentage terms, but in Canada assisted suicide, introduced in 2016, is the fifth leading cause of death and growing. The liberals who focus on individual conscience and rights, on the basis of an initiative from the House of Lords and its response from a Labor MP in the Commons, hope to introduce the practice also in England and Scotland, with a law meanwhile also approved in Westminster, and the crucial vote is expected today. We too are quite advanced, due to a ruling by the Constitutional Court in the wake of the ultra-liberal activism of the Radicals. In France I’m not sure, but after abortion as a right in the Constitution, once the celebration for the reopening of the Paris cathedral has passed, a sort of Morsellian Paris without the Pope, anything is possible. The prevailing arguments in favor are known. Free decision of conscience: I want to die, I prefer a gentle death with the help of medical science to a dying and painful life.
On the other hand, with abortion as a right, the idea of life as the only possible acceptance has largely passed, not as an incontrovertible fact, despite the great affection that surrounds children when they are victims of non-medical wars. The counterarguments are equally important: there are not only the adamantine consciences of the masters of themselves, there are also the vulnerable, the disabled, the discarded, those who at a certain point in life, for a thousand reasons of maladjustment, think they cannot be able to afford it anymore, perhaps in many cases for reasons that could be reversible in the long run (anorexia, social and family isolation, serious depression, etc.). Furthermore, it is difficult to establish that medicine, legally linked, before Christianity, to helping people exist, can easily become, and without substantial conscientious objections or other serious implications, an instrument for nothingness..
The discussion rages, or floats, or flourishes sadly, between praiseworthy prayers of confessional religions, oppositions as rational as the favorable legislative proposals are or appear to be, crusades on points of law and even some cynicism aimed at cutting unproductive public spending. Perhaps it is also worth considering a general, very general, so to speak, argument concerning the fate of democracies and civil liberties, of which assisted suicide boasts of being a cutting-edge sector or section, like abortion, euthanasia, etc. In the world, societies, countries, hierarchical structures, powers, populations, educational schools, churches and fighting sects are pressing: their common denominator is cultural, have children, live life, be prolific, be honorable and aggressive, don’t be fooled by the indulgence of Western ideology towards the sense of the imminent end, have a strong future, seize the opportunities, the opportunities, be brave and fight.
Perhaps it is bad rhetoric, with worse than bad implications, and it smacks of that great barracks in the process of mobilization that is anti-Western anti-democracy, with its fifth columns also present in the West. Opposing all this with our celebrated way of life, our certainty of conscience and our idea of rational choices potentially possessed by each adult individual, is obviously necessary, but not enough. Stoic suicide is guaranteed by the state, given that this is what the legislation of extreme assistance in the most painful situations talks about, it could be a rational and intrinsically losing response to the world’s claim to youth and to gladiatorial violence that risks savagely attacking our rationality understood as softness, renunciation, resignation to the old age of freedom.
