The Cost of Silence

First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.

The defining characteristic of modern American life is busyness. We seem to spend our daily lives ricocheting like a pinball up and down, back and forth, over the same terrain, so intent on our own motion that we fail to notice those blurry objects in the margins. Sometimes, when the details come into focus, the ugliness is more than we think we can bear and motion becomes a welcome distraction.

This busy week Hugh Hewitt informed his listeners about the Groningen Academic Hospital in the Netherlands, the first nation to legalize euthanasia for consenting adults, where a committee decides to kill patients who are unable to consent, such as children, the mentally retarded and the comatose. Kill is a jarring word. Should I have substituted put to sleep, laid to rest, or released from suffering?

Eric Van Yijlick, the project manager for SCEN (Support and Consultation on Euthanasia in the Netherlands), prefers to call the practice of euthanizing newborns life ending without request. According to CNN, Van Yijlick claims that, while he knows of no official statistics regarding such cases, he believes that only a few newborn lives are ended without request in the Netherlands each year.

Well, that makes me feel better. How about you? Lethal injection in a sterile, scientifically sanctioned environment sounds so much more humane than the old fashioned, back alley euthanasia.

Word games are a handy way to disguise the ugliness we choose to ignore. Those things destroyed by the millions in the womb aren’t babies, they’re fetuses. That procedure whereby a full term baby is butchered as it descends through the birth canal is partial birth abortion, not infanticide.

The jury that deemed Scott Peterson guilty of murdering his unborn son disagrees, essentially finding that Conner Peterson had a right to his own life. Surely you do not need to experience the pain of miscarriage as I have to understand that, when an unborn baby is aborted by an act of man or nature, the life that would have led to its birth has ended. If anything is in a state where it can be rendered unliving, first it must be living. To quibble otherwise is a dangerous subterfuge that demeans language and life and leads directly, I believe, to the Groningen Protocol for determining who should live and who should die.

In the space of a generation, we have reduced the meaning of life to an exercise in semantics while reducing the very size of that generation by a method far more efficient than all the wars in American history.

The absence of a collective horror reminds me of the quote posted above attributed to the Reverend Martin Niemoller in 1945 about Nazism, except with a new twist.

First they came for the fetuses, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a fetus.

Then they came for the full term babies, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a baby.

Then they came for the children, the mentally retarded and the comatose, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a busy adult dealing with my own problems.

Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.