Earlier this month, a bill came before the French parliament that would legalize euthanasia. The novelist and essayist Michel Houellebecq considers its implications:
Catholics will do their best to resist, but, sad to say, we have more or less gotten used to the idea that the Catholics always lose. [Devout] Muslims and Jews . . . think exactly the same as Catholics; the media are generally in strong agreement about hiding this fact. I do not have a lot of illusions; these faiths will end up by giving way and submitting to the yoke of “republican law.”
There remain only the doctors, in whom I had placed little hope, doubtless because I am not very familiar with them; but it is undeniable that some of them resist and refuse to kill their patients and that they will remain perhaps the last barrier to euthanasia. I do not know where they get this courage; maybe it is only respect for the Hippocratic oath: “Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course.” It is possible. The public uttering of this oath must have been a significant moment in their lives. In any case their struggle is an admirable one, even if it is a struggle “for honor.”
The honor of a civilization is not exactly nothing. But really something else is at stake, from the anthropological point of view. It is a question of life and death. And on this point I am going to have to be very explicit: when a country—a society, a civilization—gets to the point of legalizing euthanasia, it loses in my eyes all right to respect. It becomes henceforth not only legitimate, but desirable, to destroy it; so that something else—another country, another society, another civilization—might have a chance to arise.
Read more on UnHerd: https://unherd.com/2021/04/how-france-lost-her-dignity/