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Austerity euthanasia is coming
The boomer obsession with "choice" ends with legal culling of the poor
Legal euthanasia is creeping inexorably across the developed world, usually under the flag of ‘freedom’ and ‘dignity’. Yesterday’s Politics Today (from about 30m in) saw the grande dame of bourgeois boomer liberalism, Polly Toynbee, advocating passionately for euthanasia in Britain as “the last liberal issue”, and against “the religious” who are standing in its way. Taking turns to be steamrollered by Toynbee’s patrician indifference to counterpoints about slippery slopes or practicability were journalist Zoe Strimpel, and Lib Dem and Conservative politicians Tim Farron and Danny Kruger.
But Toynbee-style providential liberalism, as I’ve argued in Feminism Against Progress, is less a neutral perspective than the moral framework that justifies liquefying social and embodied norms, and replacing them with technology. And this framework has turned radically against us as we’ve shifted from the industrial to the cyborg era.
For in this new age, industrial ‘progress’ has redirected the drive for technological mastery from the material world, toward the worlds of human ideas, and of living creatures - including ourselves. One effect of this has been a fundamental change in what we understand medicine to be for: specifically, a shift from viewing medicine as restorative to viewing it as ameliorative. The cyborg medical paradigm, that is, sees ‘normal’ as a problem to be solved, with no theoretical limit on the potential for upgrades.
In my book I look at how this technologisation of ideas and life plays out in our relational and embodied worlds - particularly in pregnancy and motherhood, which is to say the beginning of life. My book sets out how this swiftly becomes dystopian when ordered to the market, especially further down the economic hierarchy. And the same dynamic - and class disparity - is just as clearly evident in euthanasia.
For just as the cyborg era turns breaks the beginning of life down into constituent parts, which can then be made available to the market, so too the end of life becomes subject to the same longing for control, and the same economic matrix. One form this takes is a new market in efforts to beat death, whether by cosmetic surgery, injecting youthful blood plasma, preserving your head cryonically in the hopes of future resuscitation, or (like ABBA) touring your comeback album by proxy, as holograms of your younger selves.
Polly Toynbee’s crisp declaration on Politics Today that “Everybody wants choice” epitomises this bourgeois boomer sense of entitlement to autonomy at any price, and in every domain of life - especially its preservation, and failing that the manner of its ending. Meanwhile her indifference to the way “choice” can play out, for those without her social, cultural and economic capital, points toward the other way the market pours into the domain of death.
That is, not just in expensively postponing death, but also in clamouring for lower-status people to be inexpensively culled. For the end of growth spells the end of welfare; that Ponzi scheme is well on its way to collapsing. And one possible fix for this problem is to re-deploy the liberal language of ‘autonomy’ and ‘dignity’ to persuade those who would otherwise need expensive health or social care to cull themselves.
A new report rolls in every day from Canada, to date the most fully-realised cyborg theocracy, concerning the extreme slipperiness of their Medical Assistance In Dying programme. Initially offered to anyone with a foreseeable death, it was swiftly extended to include people with disabilities and mental health conditions. Talks are afoot about extending this ‘freedom’ to ‘mature minors’: in other words, facilitating teenage suicides even against their parents’ will.
There are already stories of struggling veterans, and those simply too poor to cope, applying for or being offered medically assisted suicide. Similarly, unhappy teenagers are a potentially limitless black hole for mental health funding - unless you just make it legal for them to kill themselves. Social media is already full of miserable teenagers talking about how they can’t wait to access MAID. I dare say permitting them to do so will relieve some considerable pressure on counselling waiting lists.
For the Toynbees of this world, unaccustomed to being contradicted by anyone, ever, self-deletion may indeed look like a ‘choice’ issue. But for anyone who’s paying any attention at all, it should be clear that the bureaucrats tasked with administrating the new ‘freedom’ to self-delete will view the main benefit in grimly pragmatic terms: it’s a great healthcare austerity measure.
Source: Reactionary Feminist
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