We are being softened up to no longer believe in the sanctity of life

The Herald Scotland

3 days ago

Our priest told us: 'The broken body of humanity is presently not far from our eyes, including last week in the Westminster Parliament which has just passed legislation that an abortion up until birth is no longer liable to criminal prosecution: a beautiful baby expecting life but broken and killed. Or again, the bill to legalise assisted suicide being passed in the House of Commons, breaking the Hippocratic Oath that a doctor is called to save lives and comfort the dying.'
Read more by Kevin McKenna
As this priest was re-iterating a basic Church teaching, his bosses – the bishops – were living the high life while choosing to cower in the soft folds of their social media account.
At Parliament last month, a majority of those we elected to represent us decided that the state could sanction assisted dying with little or no safeguards to prevent vulnerable people – especially those with mental health challenges – being coerced to end their lives. No matter that we have the resources to ease suffering at the end of life: the state had decided that their deaths would be more convenient and less costly than easing their pain.
Almost all of the UK's main disabled groups opposed this. The state has effectively said to them that if you require state assistance to live then you are considered a legitimate target. The message to these people and their families is clear: your disability means you are a little less equal than us.
It inadvertently highlighted one of the problems that authentic Catholicism has with abortion. If you justify it by saying that an aborted foetus can't exist independently of its mother then what does this say about those in society who are also unable to exist without the assistance of a third party?
It begins to encroach on the same territory occupied by eugenics, the purest and most sinister form of capitalism: that you can arbitrarily be classed as undeserving to live if you don't garner enough points on a subjective scoring system in this human perfection procurement exercise.
Perhaps it's only a curious quirk of history, but this inhuman and repugnant erosion of human dignity has occurred at a point when – for the first time in what we might loosely call civilisation – human beings are being forced to consider questions about what it means to be fully human. How much value do we set on this when machines can now replicate much of what we once believed to be indisputably and irreplaceably human?
The development of Artificial Intelligence is in its infancy and growing faster than our ability to process it and to control it. It's thus reasonable to venture that we are the first stamp of human civilisation to be confronted with a question none before us has had to consider: how much value do we place on being human for its own sake? We are at the beginning of the post-work age and already some have decided that being fully human is now a privilege that must be earned and that a high bar must be set.
Anti-abortion protestors pictured outside an Edinburgh clinic (Image: Newsquest)
If you want to ask why the richest people and corporations on the planet are spending billions exploring the possibility of human settlements on other planets (for the right sort of people, of course) then perhaps you need to look about you and start paying attention.
In truth, the softening-up process has begun. We are already being primed to accept this new normality. Part of this was in accepting that healthy babies can be killed in the womb. Meanwhile, elderly and infirm people must now live with a new jeopardy: that the state's patience and forbearance about their physical and mental state is finite and that when their government decides that critical measures must be taken to protect the economy then they'll quickly become an expensive indulgence. After this, who knows who else the state will deem to be a luxury it can no longer afford?
The German philosopher, Karl Jaspers, who was himself persecuted by the Nazis, wrote after the war: 'that which has happened is a warning. To forget it is guilt. It was possible for this to happen and it remains possible for it to happen again at any minute.'
Kevin McKenna is a Herald writer and columnist. He is Features Writer of the Year and writes regularly about the working-class people and communities of Scotland.