Piergiorgio Welby, a 60-year-old Italian, is hooked up to machines that keep him alive. He is incarcerated in a body that cannot move, in the last stages of the terminal condition called muscular dystrophy. He can communicate only through a sophisticated computer which interprets the flickering of his eyes – the only part of him that can move. He is, to put it simply, in hell on earth. Mr Welby wants his doctors to take him off the machines, so that he can die in peace. They refuse to do it, because for some strange reason, it has been decided that this would be classed as deliberate killing. Mr Welby’s has become a cause celebre. His face is all over the Italian news.
I know even less about Italian law than I do about Italian parliamentary politics, but this is the first time I have heard the switching off of life support machines to be euthanasia in the eyes of the law. Even in holier-than-the-pope Malta, people’s machines are switched off and their treatment stopped if that’s what they want (or what their relatives want if the dying person is out of it). It’s not considered euthanasia, but humane behaviour. What’s not humane, on the other hand, is keeping a dying person hooked up to a drip so that he takes three weeks to die instead of three days.
It’s taken Piergiorgio Welby to remind Italians that they are supposed to be Roman Catholic, despite living in a society far more secular than Germany’s. I suppose it’s easier to be Catholic when considering the fate of somebody else, rather than your own. Italy has embraced with passion contraception, abortion and individualism, all highly anti-Catholic, and sent its birth rate into free-fall. Divorce and cohabitation are at par for the course, though marriage is rare to start with because the men can’t be prised away from their mothers until they are balding and in need of hernia operations, and even then they still go “home” for lunch. The churches are empty. Corruption is rampant. There is virtual anarchy in Naples now as criminal gangs clash, with a police-imposed curfew and tourists confined to their hotels after dark. Mr Welby’s life support machine, however, will not be switched off. Oh no, that would be a betrayal of Italy’s Catholic principles.
What Catholic principles? There isn’t anything in Catholic doctrine or dogma that commands all those of the faith to accept medical treatment which prolongs their life and their suffering. There is nothing to oblige Catholics to undergo heart operations, chemotherapy, cancer surgery, or even treatment for HIV. And there can’t possibly be anything in Italian law that forces people of whatever faith to subject themselves to life-prolonging treatment. Forcing Mr Welby to stay on that machine when he doesn’t want to is like forcing chemotherapy on a cancer patient who doesn’t want it.
It’s horrendous. People on life support machines have been shoved into a separate class of person, for whom the withdrawal of treatment in accordance with their own wishes has come to be classed as “euthanasia”, and refused outright. I put that in inverted commas because it is nothing of the sort. Euthanasia is getting a pillow and suffocating the patient with it, or giving him a huge injection of some lethal chemical. Euthanasia isn’t hooking people up to a life support machine and then taking them off it when they decide that they would rather die in peace.
This is the big difference, you see: people with cancer can speak and move and make sure that nobody forces treatment on them. People on life support machines are victims of the abuse of forced treatment because they cannot defend themselves. Somebody who is suffering from total paralysis cannot tell the approaching doctors to go away before he calls the police. He cannot rip out the plug himself. He cannot tell the do-gooders to buzz off and leave him alone, to die in peace as he wants to. He must lie there like a helpless log and be subjected to abuse, hooked up to pipes and wires and unable to use his hands to tear them out, or to use his tongue to give everyone a good telling-off. I can think of few forms of hell more dreadful than that.
It isn’t pulling out the plug that goes against God’s will, but leaving it in. That should be obvious, but scientific development has made us obsessed with the artificial prolonging of life, and religious interpretation has warped in turn to fit these freakish 21st-century attitudes. At which point did religious thought – or rather, the thought of some religious people – conclude that keeping people hooked up to machines against their will and with no hope of recovery is God’s way? One would have thought that God’s way is allowing them to die in peace, instead of torturing them all the way to an even slower and more painful death. The trouble is that some people don’t know how to mind their own business, which brings me to my next subject.
* * *
The Gift for Life Movement has published the names of the 30 MPs who have signed its petition, no doubt pour encourager les autres. Well, I hope les autres keep their head screwed on right and, when approached by petition-waving, smooth-talking Gift-for-Lifers, offer them a whisky and some sweet chat, then show them the door. They don’t have to be rude, but they don’t have to put up with creepy anti-democratic behaviour, either. The Constitution is sacred. Democracy is sacred. The entrenchment of the anti-abortion provisions as proposed by Gift of Life would undermine the sacredness of both. The end does not justify the means, and the end is not justified or justifiable, either.
Besides, we haven’t elected our representatives to ensure that our great-grandchildren will have to keep going to Catania for their abortions rather than having them in Malta. What our descendants do or don’t do after we have departed this life is their business and not ours. It is certainly not the business of the Gift of Life Movement and the 30 MPs who have signed that misguided petition: a small coterie that seeks to control from a time capsule the destiny of a million others yet unborn.
We have elected our representatives to see to the here and now, to our needs and wants, and not to engage in this kind of displacement activity. Stop wasting time, will you? If you are going to run around signing petitions, then how about starting with the campaign against rampant bird-shooting? Ha, I’d like to see those 30 MPs sign a petition against that one – yet they’re the ones who are in parliament and in a position to crack down on the problem. Instead, they’re having a plastic foetus party.
I’m disappointed to see certain names on the Gift for Life list, and absolutely appalled to see the names of those of whom I had a much higher opinion. Perhaps they think that signing the petition will endear them to the public and prove that they are against abortion. It doesn’t. It just proves that they have listened a little too hard to Paul Vincenti, who is a man on a mission.
Anyone on that list who stands for election in my district is not going to get my vote – no, not even number 10. I will leave that box unmarked. It’s not because I’m in favour of abortion, but because I am in favour of democracy, and I won’t stand for anything that undermines it. The most attractive quality in an MP – or anyone else for that matter – is the ability to think clearly. Clear thought is remarkably absent from this muddled hysteria, as MPs fall like skittles under the onslaught of over-emotional campaigners burning with missionary zeal.
My vote goes to the first MP to chuck back the plastic foetus, and to tell the Gift-for-Lifers to get a life. They could look after some real babies for a start. The children’s homes in Ethiopia, Romania and Russia are teeming with them, and they’re desperately short of staff and funds.
It might be cynical to suggest that campaigning for babies that may be born in the 22nd century is easier than wiping vomit, changing nappies and mopping fevered brows in ghastly orphanages overseas, but it’s a fact. Standing up for mythical unborn babies is a damn lot easier than looking after real ones.
* * *
People who burn with missionary zeal make me want to double-lock the doors at night.
I find any kind of extremism really frightening, and with good reason. People should be able to stay on an even keel, and keep rational and balanced. In North America, the anti-abortion campaign has spiralled right out of control, with doctors and nurses being shot and clinics set on fire.
I once had a conversation with a Canadian member of Opus Dei, who defended the attacks on abortion clinics by telling me: “If you knew that somebody was in there being murdered, wouldn’t you do the same?” We were drinking coffee in Sliema, and it was surreal. I made my excuses and never took her calls after that.
Her intensity and steely resolve had begun to give me the creeps even before that – there is no one as hard, intolerant, unyielding and unsentimental as a militant Catholic – but that conversation really tipped the scales for me. I gathered up my skirt and ran, fast.