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“Assisted suicide” continues to prosper.
Back in 2014 I wrote here about a healthy two-year-old giraffe named Marius, who, amid much controversy, was euthanized by the Copenhagen Zoo to make room for “a genetically more valuable giraffe,” as the zoo’s scientific director rather indelicately put it. An international zoo official supported his decision, saying that critics (most of them, apparently, American) should think less about Marius and more about “the bigger picture.” As I commented at the time, these two zoo folk weren’t – aren’t – alone; they belong to a contemporary breed of people, particularly thick on the ground in northern Europe, who think this way not just about animals but, yes, about human beings.
These “bigger picture” types would be quick to deny that there’s anything morally dubious about their position. On the contrary, as I wrote in my 2014 piece, they’re “certain that they are noble and good. They believe in the cycle of life. They believe in quality of life. They just don’t happen to believe in the individual life.” Often, I added, they contrast themselves to “sentimentalists” – many of them, yes, Americans – “who don’t grasp that every individual life is only part of a larger design, a ‘bigger picture,’ and should be extinguished the moment it becomes burdensome or inconvenient.” I suggested that “there exists a certain continuity between this way of thinking and that which made possible the horrors of the Final Solution.”…
