Wilfred McClay on the First Things blog wonders if the problem is a "party of death" or actually a party of radical individualism that seeks life…for itself, independent and pain-free. And we know how well that will work out.
Abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, the cannibalization of embryos—all these things are linked, but they do not reflect a desire to promote death per se. Instead, they reflect a world in which the overwhelming desire of the sovereign individual will to have its way, and to order and manufacture a world it can live in without let or hindrance, is regarded as the chief source of value, or at any rate the value that trumps all others. They reflect a view of life that trivializes death, precisely because it fails to understand what life is.
But life is unfreezable, and complete independence is a sterile fantasy, inconsistent with our human nature. That nature speaks to us continuously of the organic interdependency of things, the seasonality of things, of a world churned and roiled by the endless process of aging and decay, and the miraculous generation of new life out of them—the ebb and flow of what the ancients called “generation and corruption.” The recognition of these things, and the acceptance of our place in them, is precisely why we care for the infirm and the weak and the hopeless among us, rather than feed them to the sharks, particularly when they are flesh of our flesh, or we of theirs. We do not do it because we believe in the abstract idea of the natural rights of each and every human being, although such beliefs are helpful and true and valuable for the durability of American democracy. We do it because our human nature commands us to if we are to play our part in the circle of life, the order of things, the drama of fecundity and endless generational succession, and be capable of the grateful, self-giving love for our forebears, and the willingness to yield the stage to our successors, which is the crowning virtue of the human heart, precisely because it recognizes and accepts that the unfreezable present is always being swamped and superseded by the onrushing tide of what is new.
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