We’ve all had that experience of having to face uncomfortable truths. We know well they are truths and yet we avoid them. It is, moreover, often not so much because we’re afraid to admit or even defend them but, rather, due to our abhorrence of those truths, which makes us despair. I had that feeling when I read this story, which is all about the slippery slope of abortion and an increasingly self-hating mankind:

The well-known platitude “but for the grace of God go I” played in my brain while reading the tragic story of a disabled Canadian father who chose to end his own life, leaving behind an 11-year-old son. It would be easy to judge Sean Tagert, who was diagnosed with ALS six years ago. Do I believe he made the wrong choice? Sure. But I wasn’t the one who was struggling to pay for my health care after losing my ability to breath on my own or feed myself. I’m not the one living under Canada’s health care system that was more than happy to pay for my suicide but not the care I needed. So, yes, I disagree with Tagert’s “choice” and mourn the loss of his life, but I blame Canada and their “touted” socialized medicine. According to a story published by CBC, Tagert died on Tuesday, August 6. A Facebook post linked to in the article provides the sad details that led to his decision: “Sean was diagnosed with ALS in March 2013. For years he endured the steady deterioration of his abilities, until suffering cardiac arrest in late Oct. 2017. He was resuscitated and placed on a ventilator, and lived since then on life support, completely immobile, communicating only via an eye-tracking computer setup. Finally, with his health rapidly deteriorating, Sean opted for a medically assisted death.” The post goes on to point the finger in the direction of the government and the mandated health care: “Ensuring consistent care was a constant struggle and source of stress for Sean as a patient. While he succeeded, with the help of many, in piecing together a suitable care facility in his own home (including an expensive saliva-suction machine, needed to prevent him from choking, obtained with the help of donations raised online), gaining the 24-hour care he required was extremely difficult, especially as the provincial government refused to fully fund home care. The few institutional options on hand, Sean pointed out, would have offered vastly inferior care while separating him from his family, and likely would have hastened his death. We would ask, on Sean’s behalf, that the government recognize the serious problems in its treatment of ALS patients and their families, and find real solutions for those already suffering unimaginably.” According to CBC: “Vancouver Coastal Health offered him 15.5 hours of home care under the Choice in Supports for Independent Living program but not the 24-hour care he needed. Tagert was later offered as much as 20 hours per day, which his doctor said was still not enough. Relocation was not an option as that would have taken him away from his son, of whom he had partial custody. A single-payer health care system will always sink to the lowest common denominator, removing choice. If death is more efficient for the system, than death it will be. And that’s on top of the gaps in medical care that those with socialized medicine suffer. Instead of finding ways to serve Tagert and his son, the Canadian health care system found it more convenient to kill him.”

I added that emphasis above because that’s what this story is all about in the simplest of terms. It also raises the critical question of how we got here. We’re seeing more and more of this utilitarian attitude toward life; a callous self-hating mankind when it comes to our fellow human beings. We see desperately ill children in the UK being denied not only treatment but also even the opportunity to travel at private expense to other countries for second opinions and potential treatment. We see the Dutch constantly expanding the terms of assisted suicide to now include the government effectively murdering you with impunity if it concludes that’s what’s best for you in its supreme judgment.

We are on a very slippery slope, indeed, which reminds me of how I got drawn to the abortion issue and came to understand the evil it represents. I attended a pro-life event some 45 years ago or so and heard a presentation explaining it wasn’t just about abortion. The presenter, with chilling prescience as I look back on it, talked about the slippery slope of abandoned morality, pointing out we’d eventually be talking the lives of the elderly and the sick if we didn’t respect life in the womb.

He was all too correct in retrospect. There’s no slope so slippery as abortion. It’s easy to rationalize away the death of the unseen, the unheard, the unheld and the yet unloved. Once we’ve done that it becomes that much easier to convince ourselves we “wouldn’t want to live like that” and, therefore, we have every excuse to deprive other human beings who live “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” of their lives as well. It’s that much easier to deprive them of nourishment, end their care and, yes, kill them.

What it all reveals is an ever decreasing respect for life masked in the language of caring; a mankind of growing self-hatred, tricked by our interior devils. And, it all started with abortion.