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Human beings don’t like to be dependent. If you’ve ever broken a bone or had some other temporary physical impediment, you know that it is difficult to accept someone else’s help, no matter how gracious they may be in giving. And we recognize that some types of dependence can be pernicious: When a person relies on others such that his or her emotional well-being hinges on external acceptance and validation, psychiatrists call it “dependent personality disorder.”
All of us were born dependent and remained so for years; most of us will experience a period of decline before we die when we’ll once again become dependent on others. Indeed, the American bioethicist and theologian Gilbert Meilaender described a trajectory or arc of life, where we begin and end our lives dependent on others but spend a great deal of time much less so—and one of the things that we do with that freedom is care for those who are dependent. The way our arcs of life crisscross over the decades is beautiful and, in the words of one highly anticipated book, dignifying.
But if we become uneasy at the thought of physically depending on others, dependency on others because of a deficiency in our mental capacity is terrifying. Half of those who live to age 85 will develop some kind of dementia; perhaps 1 to 2 percent of people have a congenital or acquired intellectual disability—like Down syndrome or a major traumatic brain injury—so severe that they are dependent on others’ care for their entire lives. In a culture like ours that prizes rational thought and self-sufficiency, we are especially anxious about the idea of losing those things.
The push for euthanasia across the Western world is predicated on this fear. People do not want to be “a burden” to their loved ones, so much so that they choose to die rather than suffer the indignities they associate with dependence. Canada has taken this logic to a grim extreme by euthanizing people who are merely poor and dependent on government welfare, while other countries like Belgium permit the suicide of those with severe mental illness. (I learned in medical school that one of the most telling symptoms of any mental illness, akin to fever for an infection, is suicidality—so how on earth can any doctor tell if a request to die is free from the machinations of mental illness?) It is utterly necessary that people of all faiths who cherish the value of being human stand against the lie that says it’s better to be dead than dependent.
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