Today, I am compelled to the keyboard with a heavy heart. We once again have “mercy killing in the name of love”. A mother, to use the term loosely, killed her son because she was stressed and overwhelmed by his Autism. In the past years, there have been increased news reports of parents killing their Autistic children. Why?
Now I’m not one to simply say it’s just an increase in occurrence, just like I’m not one to believe that “compassion murders” haven’t happened before now. They always have happened but the reported frequency has been increasing in recent years. I would like to say this is because we have more awareness of this insidious behavior but the responses that have always been the same from the ableist, typical, non-disability crowd have proved otherwise. That is overwhelming compassion for the murder(s) because they had it hard as a parent or caregiver. Nevermind the fact that the disabled person is the victim of abled egoism and homicide! Oh, think of the horror to perish at the hands of the only person you trust on the planet! The general public romanticizes unsolicited mercy killings, but at what cost?
In a very tongue in cheek way, I am going to say it’s my Autistic Empathy that reasons that when a person engages in consenting acts of sex with the intent to reproduce, the lack of concern if they are to conceive offspring because they feel that they are ready to be parents or even just accepting you are pregnant and choose to keep the pregnancy, you enter a covenant with the child/ren that you have conceived (or adopted in some cases). It’s an eternal agreement with nature and whatever higher power you may believe in, whether moral, ethical, the universe, or religion, that you help that child thrive. In times where the child is born disabled, it’s a covenant that we all should honor until we leave this Earth.
We have an entire section of society that frowns on terminating viable pregnancies even if there is a disability found prior to birth, however, this pro-life outrage is often absent in the wake of a mercy killing. If one is not for terminating a pregnancy on the basis that it is still a human why are we okay with killing a postnatal 10-year-old with a disability? The answer is simple and can be explained with the boiled frog metaphor.
A “Cliff Note Explanation” for those who did not click the link! There is a myth, or fable if you prefer, that if you put a frog into a pot of hot water then that frog will jump, fight, and try to flee for its life but you put a frog in a pot of frog friendly tempered water and gradually heat it up the frog will allow itself to be cooked to death.
This is exactly what is happening with society in regard to mercy killings! We relate and feel bad for the first one we heard that made national news, often it’s a romantic expose on a husband that killed his wife “out of love” and not being able “to see her suffer”. The next one, well, it’s not as bad as the first or it may be worse than the first, either way, you reason, they were under stress as well and people act out of character under stress. You understand how someone would kill an adult child that was afflicted such as theirs was. The disabled adult is in a better place now. Soon, we learn of another carer snapping under duress and murdering a loved one, a child, and we feel for them, relate, empathize. You reason that the other two were acceptable and so this is as well. You can see yourself in their position and your heart aches for them, that they had to make that decision.
Years, go by and we keep hearing of these heart wrenching decisions. All of the abled society deems it necessary that these are acceptable murders that should be forgiven. You’re consider yourself pro-life and against abortion and assisted suicide but thoughts turn to the disabled in your own family. The last time you attended a March for *Insert Hypocritical Cause Here* or convention your Autistic child made it impossible to be there. They were clearly in extreme distress and you just “can’t watch them suffer anymore”. Instead of doing what is rational and logical in the name of love which is adapting to them being in your life by adjusting your lifestyle to enable them to thrive, your mind turns to murder for mercy. You’re a martyr in your plight and God and society would understand! You focus on your perception of quality life, you don’t consider that this person, this human that loves you and trusts you to cherish them and help them live may not even perceive themselves as in need of death to escape. All they know is that when you enter the room their heart soars.
I will end this entry there because without saying the people that have allowed themselves to be peer pressured into seeing the murder of the disabled as acceptable are incorrigible monsters. We may have a disability but at least we aren’t morally inept.
Until Death Do Us Part may we all join hands and enable each and every human to survive regardless of life circumstances.
BeautiDivergence 