The beginning and end of human life: the view from Australia

A major and relevant theme of the Church's doctrine of creation is that human beings are not their own. We are not our own creators and thus not the authors of our lives; that function can only be served by God. Psalm 100 says it well.

Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us, and not ourselves;
we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.

While the Christian journey towards God results in self emptying in service to the neighbour, (most closely husband and wife) modernity demands that we are here to serve ourselves. Both VAD and abortion are in such service. The person that finds comfort in the knowledge that he can instigate self-murder by the hands of another is motivated by the fear of suffering. In our constant effort to perfect our world, suffering has no place, and must be eliminated by whatever means, even by putting the sufferer to death. I am reminded of standing in a hospital ward in clericals after a "code blue" in which a patient died. One of the attending doctors saw me and said "don't worry, he didn't suffer". Surely this missed the point. Death is the enemy of the living, not suffering. While I am no fan of suffering and I reject suffering for sufferings sake, it is nonsense to think it can be eliminated from our lives. As soon as you marry or have a child or love anything you open yourself to the prospect of suffering.

If it was the aim of Jesus to avoid suffering, then he would not have set his face towards Jerusalem and what he knew awaited him there. There are, even now, circumstances in which being Christian may bring suffering and death. Although never sought, suffering "produces endurance, and endurance produces character and character produces hope." (Rom 5:3-4) When the road to decentring the self is never begun, we become self-obsessed and suffering and death become all-consuming concerns. If we cannot avoid death then at least we can be in control of it, we can beat it to the punch. But that means, finally, that we are complicit with death and if we are complicit with death, we may not notice that death matters and if we do not notice that, we may also not notice why life matters. Both abortion and VAD normalise death as a solution and irretrievably changes our view of life. Death is the enemy of life and must be opposed. This does not necessarily mean that we must extend life at all costs or that we may find ourselves in the blessed situation of embracing the inevitable in the sure knowledge that we will never be separated from the love of God. But to be complicit with death by our actions to end the life of a child or a dying one is unconscionable.

In Australia, perhaps the most secular country on earth, the abortion debate has been relegated to the margins and VAD legislation has been passed with little outcry. Indeed, the Victorian/Tasmanian synod of the Uniting Church has recently had a bet both ways. There exists in our society a state of mutual incoherence. On the one side there are those who are willing to abort their children, on the other those who seek them as being central to a fulfilled life. In Roman society at the time of Jesus it was common practice to expose babies in the country to die of dehydration or animal attack, a horror robustly described in Tsiolkas' novel "Damascus". Suicide was a respectable tradition. The advent of Christianity changed all that. The waning of the authority of the Church in our time has exposed us to the cold winds of pre-Christian society in the name, paradoxically, of the freedom of the individual.

Governments all over the world have made their decision that it is lawful to solve the problem of unwanted pregnancy by eliminating the child and are in the process of legalising VAD. Christians may protest that a child is a gift from God and should be preserved as diligently as possible, and the dying need to complete their journey into God, but world opinion is in the process of turning its back. None of us can, with a clear conscience, affirm the present situation as regards abortion or VAD. The unresolved contradictions entailed will always produce uneasiness and hence it cannot be thought that this is the end of the story.