The Human Animal

If suicide and childless are indeed becoming common, look to the environment.

Photo by Thiago Cerqueira on Unsplash

Pedro Gonzales of Contra “dropped” an interesting post on Saturday.¹

He finds the best pictures. Anyway, the impetus for the article seems to be this story.

The headline is really all you need to know. The woman is otherwise healthy, but she has depression, autism, and borderline personality disorder, and she feels like her life isn’t worth living anymore.

I have to be honest. I have always been for allowing people to leave this world on their own terms. I watched a friend literally drown in her own lung fluids after they took her off a respirator. That is just as ugly and traumatic as it sounds. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that around the same time, I had older pets, and it felt like one after the other we were going to the vet or, in the case of our dog at the time, the vet was kind enough to come to the house. I would have gladly given my friend the same death I gave my pets. There was no comparison. It seemed inhumane to make her and her family go through what they did.

However, humans can take the best ideas and turn them into something ugly. From the Fox article . . .

Protestant Theological University healthcare ethics professor Theo Boerin served on a euthanasia review board in the Netherlands from 2005 until 2014. During this time, he told The Free Press, he observed Dutch euthanasia “evolve from death being a last resort to death being a default option.”

If you hear the stories coming out of Canada, you have no doubt about this. The situation has gotten so perverted that one hears stories of people being told to consider euthanasia simply because they are poor.

The other problem, particularly in a capitalist system, is that good intentions are so often corrupted by money, as Gonzales points out:

A recent study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that the pharmaceutical and medical device industry [dedicated to euthanasia] paid physicians over $12 billion in the last decade. “Despite evidence that financial conflicts of interest may influence physician prescribing and may damage patients’ trust in medical professionals, such relationships remain pervasive,” the authors noted.

No kidding.

He goes on to talk about how certain companies are working to cut out the “middleman,” the doctor, and just sell directly to the public. (Suicide pod, anyone?)

We haven’t even legalized euthanasia nationally, and we’re already having an issue with the malign influence of an ability to profit off death.

Although death might be the stated focus of Gonazles’s article, he goes on to talk about birth, or more specifically falling birthrates. I include here his summary of the statistics, because he does it well.

U.S. birth rates fell almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. The average American woman had about three children in 1950. That number is around 1.6 children now, which is lower than the “replacement rate” necessary for maintaining population stability. Moreover, a survey from the Pew Research Center conducted in 2021 found that 44 percent of non-parents ages 18 to 49 said it is “not too or not at all likely” that they will have children someday. That was an increase of 7 percentage points from the 37 percent who said the same in a 2018 survey.

What was the reason cited by 56 percent of non-parents under 50 who said it’s unlikely they’ll have kids someday? They just don’t want them. Men and women both. “There are no differences by gender,” Pew found.

I have to be honest again. It would take a lot of convincing before I actually saw this as a problem. I know the conservative arguments about economics, but I also see another side that will tie in with my larger point: I can point to many signs that human beings are actually overpopulating. Wait, before you get angry, I’m not with Bill Gates. I don’t want deliberate efforts to eliminate people. But . . . consider that the attitude you’re seeing may be an evolutionary failsafe to keep our kind from being so overpopulated as to destroy the species as a whole.

And that brings us to my larger obvious but also often missed point: Humans are animals. And as animals, we have the same base programming all animals have: We want to survive and we want to reproduce.

If either of those is not true, and people are going against that hardwiring, one has to ask what is wrong with the environment? Although animals rarely commit suicide (except for the kamikaze pheasants I grew up with in North Dakota), animals will stop reproducing if conditions become adverse enough. Rearing young is a strain, and if the situation is such that an animal is just struggling to survive on her own, she will often not get pregnant, and if she does, she will often destroy her young or abandon them.

Humans are more cerebral animals (I know, it doesn’t seem like it sometimes, but we are). So we’re going to be affected as much by psychology as we are the basics like food.

And if you have large numbers of people going against the basic programming of all life, but especially animal life, to live and reproduce, you have to look at the environment they’re living in . . . the society.

Let’s take the twenty-eight-year-old above. From the Fox article:

She once had ambitions to become a psychiatrist, but she was never able to finish school or start a career due to her own mental illness. But now, she is tired of living and wishes to end her life. . . .

Ter Beek's decision came after her psychiatrist told her that they had tried everything to help her mental health.

"There's nothing more we can do for you. It's never gonna get any better," she recalled her psychiatrist saying.

Now I’ve dealt with doctors. I’ve heard this myself. And I’ll tell you, it lead me to dark places. I just got really lucky that I found people outside the medical system to help, I had enough money I could live without holding down an eight to five job, and I had people around me who were patient and flexible and helped me keep going.

But if I didn’t have that? Well, let’s just say, I have my doubts that you would be reading this.

Was my life any more worth living than this woman’s? I’d suspect not, not at that point in time, and for much the same reason. Nothing is terminally wrong with either of us, and I won’t begin to suggest for a moment that I am “stronger” than she is. But my environment was better, and I was given the chance to make peace with my life as it was and I finally found help.

I know that there is a conservative tendency to lay this at the feet of individuals or even at the feet of the “left.” But I would ask you to consider that the insanity of the “left” is a response to the same conditions that are driving the euthanasia movement and the low birthrate. I’d also ask you to consider that the acceptance of suicide and desire to remain childless are so pervasive that they have to be coming from something systemic, meaning a condition or conditions that are society-wide.

So what could those be?

I have my ideas, but what are yours?

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So it was seventy-three on Friday and on Sunday, I took my car out to my sister and mother’s house in Lockwood, back up in a coolie with steep hills. It was snowing huge flakes when I left town and headed that way. By the time I left my mother, there were four inches on the car and ground and the roads were so slushy I was worried that I wasn’t going to make it back out of the subdivision.

I love Montana. (That’s sarcasm.)

1. I love all this lingo.