Euthanasia
claimed its most famous victim last Saturday. At the age of 95, Belgian Nobel
laureate Christian de Duve was killed with a lethal injection. He died in his
home, surrounded by his four children.
He had planned his death for weeks and
even explained his reasons and his
philosophy of life in a long interview with the Belgian newspaper Le Soir. This was published
immediately after his demise.
Why Saturday? Apparently de Duve had
cancer, but he had also fallen down on 1 April and spent several humiliating
hours on the floor. He took it as a sign of worse to come and decided to set a
date for his euthanasia – which is legal in Belgium. He waited until his son,
who lives in the United States, arrived home. His daughter Anne described the
final moments to Le Soir:
‘It was impressive. He was smiling, asking us not to cry, saying that it was a
happy moment. I’ve never seen anyone who was so full of life at the moment of
death. He left us in great serenity, refusing painkillers before the final injection.
As he left us, he said farewell as he smiled at us.’
Born in 1917, de Duve was deservedly
famous in Belgium as its only living Nobel laureate. He shared the 1974 Nobel
for Physiology or Medicine with Albert Claude and George E Palade. His contribution
was describing the structure and function of discovered peroxisomes and
lysosomes, small structures within cells. In his very active retirement, he
devoted himself to writing about the origin of life.
No doubt de Duve’s death will be used by
the euthanasia and assisted-suicide lobbies in the UK, the US, Canada,
Australia and elsewhere as an advertisement for legalisation. Belgian notables
tumbled over themselves to eulogise his memory. Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo
praised his exemplary career and public spirit. Leading politician Paul
Magnette lauded his conviction and courage. PZ Meyers, of the popular blog Pharyngula, exclaimed: ‘What a dignified and honorable way to
go!’
And, in fact, De Duve’s death seems like
the ideal euthanasia. A man who had exhausted the best life had to offer
decided in all lucidity and serenity that it was time to slip away, surrounded
by those who loved him. Why shouldn’t everyone be able to depart like this?
Don’t be fooled. De Duve’s death is no
advertisement for euthanasia.
First of all, activists argue that it is a
necessary escape for the terminally ill in unbearable pain. De Duve was not
terminally ill and not in unbearable pain. He was very old and dependent, but
apparently not bed-ridden. His death makes it clear that the Belgians think
that being old is reason enough for doctors to kill someone. And relatives are
unlikely to stop them.
Second, newspaper accounts suggest that he
believed that he was a burden on his children. His beloved wife had died in
2008. His health was failing. No one was urging him to keep living. On the
contrary, the journalist from Le
Soir, Béatrice Delvaux, seemed thrilled at the news that he would be
euthanased. She made no effort to dissuade him. His children all agreed that it
was best for him to go.
Despite his daughter’s tender words, this
sounds more like elder abuse than care. As one profane but perceptive comment on
the Pharnygula post about de Duve put it: ‘He made
the decision after taking a fall? This article makes it sound like if you break
a hip you’re better off dead. It is the most insulting and dehumanising form of
ableism imaginable.’
Finally, even if de Duve was not suffering
from clinical depression, he seemed temperamentally melancholic. His 2009 book, The Genetics of Original Sin,
despairs of the future of the environment and of the human race. He sketches a
world worthy of Hieronymus Bosch: ‘The living world has become impoverished,
species are being lost every day, energy and other resources are nearing
exhaustion, the environment is deteriorating, pollution is everywhere, climate
is changing, natural balances are threatened. Especially, human beings are
being crushed by their own number. Overcrowded cities are spawning increasingly
lawless suburbs. Waste is accumulating in and around them, straining the
capacity to deal with it. Vast areas are witness to the struggles of destitute
populations trying to survive under unlivable conditions.
De Duve continues: ‘In spite of the
advances of medicine, deathly epidemics are more menacing than ever before.
Conflicts, exacerbated by economic disparities, nationalisms, and
fundamentalisms, are raging in various parts of the world. The spectre of a
nuclear holocaust has become thinkable.’ De Duve was a lightning rod for all of
the anxieties of baby boomers. Although he was born a generation before them,
he dreamed the same nightmares, worshipped the same heroes, and proposed the
same solutions.
His heroes were Malthus and Paul Ehrlich;
his villain was the oppressive and obsessive Catholic Church (even though he
was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences). His solutions were
anything which would defuse the population bomb: homosexuality, contraception,
sterilisation, abortion, taxing children. ‘Given the urgency of the problem,
political authorities should, with the support of as many moral authorities as
possible, take active positions in favor of limiting births’, he wrote.
De Duve’s philosophy was that we will all
perish unless we take responsibility for directing our own evolution. He even
thought that hatcheries of cloned infants in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World were a better idea than the randomness
of natural procreation. ‘Substituting reasoned choice for such a blind game
could be seen as desirable’, he wrote. Man’s inability to fix the lottery of
life seems to have driven him to a deep pessimism.
Like a snowball of angst, de Duve rolled
through the last years of his life, adding more and more existential threats to
the continued existence of humanity until he became a miserabilist snowman with
a scarf emblazoned ‘Après nous le Déluge’.
With all this weighing upon him, no wonder
he asked for euthanasia. No wonder his baby-boomer children thought it was a
good idea. Despair over his own present and despair over the world’s future was
literally a lethal combination.
There is a lesson here for the rest of the
world. De Duve’s choice is worrying in the light of the staggering increase in
baby-boomer suicides in the US. According to statistics from the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published earlier this month, suicide
rates among men in their 50s have risen more than 50 per cent in the past
decade. For women in their early 60s, the increase is nearly 60 per cent. ‘It
is the baby boomer group where we see the highest rates of suicide’, the CDC’s
deputy director, Ileana Arias, told the New York Times. ‘There may be
something about that group, and how they think about life issues and their life
choices that may make a difference… The boomers had great expectations for what
their life might look like, but I think perhaps it hasn’t panned out that way.’
She adds: ‘All these conditions the boomers are facing, future cohorts are
going to be facing many of these conditions as well.’
By one calculation, the number of euthanasia cases in
Belgium has increased 4,620 per cent since it was legalised in 2002. There’s no
telling how many would die if baby-boomers miserabilists in the US, UK, Canada
or Australia had Christian de Duve’s option.
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