My Path to Atheism

by Annie Besant

Life is the gift of God, and is therefore sacred, and must only be taken back by the giver of life.*

* We, of course, here, have no concern with theological
questions touching the existence or non-existence of Deity,
and express no opinion about them.

Euthanasia is an interference with the course of nature, and is therefore an act of rebellion against God.

Pain is a spiritual remedial agent inflicted by God, and should therefore be patiently endured.

Life is the gift of God, and is therefore sacred, and must only be taken back by the Giver of life. This objection is one of those high-sounding phrases which impose on the careless and thoughtless hearer, by catching up a form of words which is generally accepted as an unquestionable axiom, and by hanging thereupon an unfair corollary. The ordinary man or woman, on hearing this assertion, would probably answer—"Life sacred? Yes, of course; on the sacredness of life depends the safety of society; anything which tampers with this principle must be both wrong and dangerous." And yet, such is the inconsistency of the thoughtless, that, five minutes afterwards, the same person will glow with passionate admiration at some noble deed, in which the sacredness of life has been cast to the winds at the call of honour or of humanity, or will utter words ot indignant contempt at the baseness which counted life more sacred than duty or principle. That life is sacred is an undeniable proposition; every natural gift is sacred, i e., is valuable, and is not to be lightly destroyed; life, as summing up all natural gifts, and as containing within itself all possibilities of usefulness and happiness, is the most sacred physical possession which we own. But it is not the most sacred thing on earth. Martyrs slain for the sake of principles which they could not truthfully deny; patriots who have died for their country; heroes who have sacrificed themselves for others' good;—the very flower and glory of humanity rise up in a vast crowd to protest that conscience, honour, love, self-devotion, are more precious to the race than is the life of the individual. Life is sacred, but it may be laid down in a noble cause; life is sacred, but it must bend before the holier sacredness of principle; life which, though sacred, can be destroyed, is as nothing before the indestructible ideals which claim from every noble soul the sacrifice of personal happiness, of personal greatness, yea, of personal life.*

* The word "life" is here used in the sense of "personal
existence in this world." It is, of course, not intended to
be asserted that life is really destructible, but only that
personal existence, or identity, may be destroyed. And
further, no opinion is given on the possibility of life
otherwhere than on this globe; nothing is spoken of except
life on earth, under the conditions of human existence.

It will be conceded, then, on all hands, that the proposition that life is sacred must be accepted with many limitations: the proposition, in fact, amounts only to this, that life must not be voluntarily laid down without grave and sufficient cause. What we have to consider is, whether there are present, in any proposed euthanasia, such conditions as overbear considerations for the acknowledged sanctity of life. We contend that in the cases in which it is proposed that death should be hastened, these conditions do exist.

We will not touch here on the question of the endurance of pain as a duty, for we will examine that further on. But is it a matter of no importance that a sufferer should condemn his attendants to a prolonged drain on their health and strength, in order to cling to a life which is useless to others, and a burden to himself? The nurse who tends, perhaps for weeks, a bed of agony, for which there is no cure but death—whose senses are strained by intense watchfulness—whose nerves are racked by witnessing torture which she is powerless to alleviate—is, by her self-devotion, sowing in her own constitution the seeds of ill-health—that is to say, she is deliberately shortening her own life. We have seen that we have a right to shorten life in obedience to a call of duty, and it will at once be said that the nurse is obeying such a call. But has the nurse a right to sacrifice her own life—and an injury to health is a sacrifice of life—for an obviously unequivalent advantage? We are apt to forget, because the injury is partially veiled to us, that we touch the sacredness of life whenever we touch health: every case of over-work, of over-strain, of over-exertion, is, so to speak, a modified case of euthanasia. To poison the spring of life is as real a tampering with the sacredness of life as it is to check its course. The nurse is really committing a slow euthanasia. Either the patient or the nurse must commit an heroic suicide for the sake of the other—which shall it be? Shall the life be sacrificed, which is torture to its possessor, useless to society, and whose bounds are already clearly marked? or shall a strong and healthy life, with all its future possibilities, be undermined and sacrificed in addition to that which is already doomed? But, granting that the sublime generosity of the nurse stays not to balance the gain with the loss, but counts herself as nothing in the face of a human need, then surely it is time to urge then to permit this self-sacrifice is an error, and that to accept it is a crime. If it be granted that the throwing away of life for a manifestly unequivalent gain is wrong, that we ought not to blind ourselves to the fact, that to sacrifice a healthy life in order to lengthen by a few short weeks a doomed life, is a grave moral error, however much it may be redeemed in the individual by the glory of a noble self-devotion. Allowing to the full the honour due to the heroism of the nurse, what are we to say to the patient who accepts the sacrifice? What are we to think of the morality of a human being who, in order to preserve the miserable remnant of life left to him, allows another to shorten life? If we honour the man who sacrifices himself to defend his family, or risks his own life to save theirs, we must surely blame him who, on the contrary, sacrifices those he ought to value most, in order to prolong his own now useless existence. The measure of our admiration for the one, must be the measure of our pity for the weakness and selfishness of the other. If it be true that the man who dies for his dear ones on the battlefield is a hero, he who voluntarily dies for them on his bed of sickness is a hero no less brave. But it is urged that life is the gift of God, and must only be taken back by the Giver of life, I suppose that in any sense in which it can be supposed true that life is the gift of God, it can only be taken back by the giver—that is to say, that just as life is produced in accordance with certain laws, so it can only be destroyed in accordance with certain other laws. Life is not the direct gift of a superior power: it is the gift of man to man and animal to animal, produced by the voluntary agent, and not by God, under physical conditions, on the fulfilment of which alone the production of life depends. The physical conditions must be observed if we desire to produce life, and so must they be if we desire to destroy life. In both cases man is the voluntary agent, in both law is the means of his action. If life-giving is God's doing, then life-destroying is his doing too. But this is not what is intended by the proposers of this aphorism. If they will pardon me for translating their somewhat vague proposition into more precise language, they say that they find themselves in possession of a certain thing called life, which must have come from somewhere; and as in popular language the unknown is always the divine, it must have come from God: therefore this life must only be taken from them by a cause that also proceeds from somewhere—i e., from an unknown cause—i e., from the Divine will. Chloroform comes from a visible agent, from the doctor or nurse, or at least from a bottle, which can be taken up or left alone at our own choice. If we swallow this, the cause of death is known, and is evidently not divine; but if we go into a house where scarlet fever is raging, although we are in that case voluntarily running the chance of taking poison quite as truly as if we swallow a dose of chloroform, yet if we die from the infection, we can imagine the illness to be sent from God. Wherever we think the element of chance comes in, there we are able to imagine that God rules directly. We quite overlook the fact that there is no such thing as chance. There is only our ignorance of law, not a break in natural order. If our constitution be susceptible of the particular poison to which we expose it, we take the disease. If we knew the laws of infection as accurately as we know the laws affecting chloroform, we should be able to foresee with like certainty the inevitable consequence; and our ignorance does not make the action of either set of laws less unchangeable or more divine. But in the "happy-go-lucky" style of thought peculiar to ignorance, the Christian disregards the fact that infection is ruled by definite laws, and believes that health and sickness are the direct expressions of the will of his God, and not the invariable consequence of obscure but probably discoverable antecedents; so he boldly goes into the back slums of London to nurse a family stricken down with fever, and knowingly and deliberately runs "the chance" of infection—i e., knowingly and deliberately runs the chance of taking poison, or rather of having poison poured into his frame. This he does, trusting that the nobility of his motive will make the act right in God's sight. Is it more noble to relieve the sufferings of strangers, than to relieve the sufferings of his family? or is it more heroic to die of voluntarily-contracted fever, than of voluntarily-taken chloroform?

The argument that life must only be taken back by the life-giver, would, if thoroughly carried out, entirely prevent all dangerous operations. In the treatment of some diseases there are operations that will either kill or cure: the disease must certainly be fatal if left alone; while the proposed operation may save life, it may equally destroy it, and thus may take life some time before the giver of life wanted to take it back. Evidently, then, such operations should not be performed, since there is risked so grave an interference with the desires of the life-giver. Again, doctors act very wrongly when they allow certain soothing medicines to be taken when all hope is gone, which they refuse so long as a chance of recovery remains: what right have they to compel the life-giver to follow out his apparent intentions? In some cases of painful disease, it is now usual to produce partial or total unconsciousness by the injection of morphia, or by the use of some other anaesthetic. Thus, I have known a patient subjected to this kind of treatment, when dying from a tumour in the aesophagus; he was consequently for some weeks before his death, kept in a state of almost complete unconsciousness, for if he were allowed to become conscious, his agony was so unendurable as to drive him wild. He was thus, although breathing, practically dead for weeks before his death. We cannot but wonder, in view of such a case as his, what it is that people mean when they talk of "life." Life includes, surely, not only the involuntary animal functions, such as the movements of heart and lungs; but consciousness, thought, feeling, emotion. Of the various constituents of human life, surely those are not the most "sacred" which we share with the brute, however necessary these may be as the basis on which the rest are built. It is thought, then, that we may rightfully destroy all that constitutes the beauty and nobility of human life, we may kill thought, slay consciousness, deaden emotion, stop feeling, we may do all this, and leave lying on the bed before us a breathing figure, from which we have taken all the nobler possibilities of life; but we may not touch the purely animal existence; we may rightly check the action of the nerves and the brain, but we must not dare to outrage-the Deity by checking the action of the heart and the lungs.

We ask, then, for the legalisation of euthanasia, because it is in accordance with the highest morality yet known, that which teaches the duty of self sacrifice for the greater good of others, because it is sanctioned in principle by every service performed at personal danger and injury, and because-it is already partially practised by modern improvements in medical science.