"Putting Grandma Down is not Compassion" | August 9, 2026

A society can say it wants a “good death” and still lose its grip on what care really means. A disturbing headline from the Netherlands: a 12-year-old was euthanized, a new boundary crossed in a country that helped pioneer modern euthanasia policy. If killing is cheaper than caring, and if usefulness becomes the yardstick for dignity, then the fence around human life comes down fast. Once death is framed as compassion, what stops the definition of compassion from expanding until it consumes the vulnerable?

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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

Transcript

Welcome And A Shocking Headline

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This is Living Catholic faith with Father Donald. Deals with Living Catholic faith in our time. Discovering God's cousins in our lives and finally hope in his word. And now you're host, Father Don Wolf.

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Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic. I'm Monsignor Don Wolfe, rector of the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother here in Oklahoma City. And over the summer, there have been a number of notable things worth paying attention to in the news. One of the most striking is a report out of the Netherlands concerning a young Dutch girl who was euthanized. She was only twelve years old, a new limit in this practice by the country that championed it. What was first envisioned to be the means by which the old and decrepit could die with dignity has now become a means by which a prepubescent was ushered off this mortal coil. While we might not think of it as particularly newsworthy, it is, of course, notable because it has become the limit case. What lies next and what difference does it make for us? Both of those are worthy answers to pursue, or worthy questions to find. Over the years, the movement of euthanasia has picked up a good deal of steam. In almost every Western country, including ours, there are provisions for the assistance of those who wish to take their own lives. This was pioneered in legislation by the Low Countries, but it didn't take long before their example led the way for the thinking and the lawmaking throughout the West. When the walls come down around the notion of the inherent dignity of life, it seems it weakened every other attempt to shield the vulnerable and the weak. Having a modern, rich, medicine-oriented country opt for self-immolation was enough to begin to hint to the rest of the world that this manner of treatment was not off the scale. With that in mind, it's caught on in a lot of places. The idea, of course, has been around for a while. It may have taken all of the agitation of the 1960s, the activism of the 1970s, and the economics of the 1990s to achieve the actual breakthrough when it came time to pass the laws. The advocates of euthanasia stretch back very much farther than that. I've mentioned several times the novel The Lord of the World by Robert Hughes Benson, in which assisted suicide is a major subplot. The novel was penned in 1890, and it was cast as a science fiction story taking place in 1990. In the story, anyone can choose to enter into a program of self-suicide as long as proper precautions are observed, mostly having to do with using a state-sponsored suicide clinic. Benson's novel projects the advocacy at work even then into the practice of the future. The author could see what was coming, given the energy in which these proposals were being made. A hundred years hence,

How Euthanasia Became Normalized

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from his time, he proposed it would be the norm. And so it has become. The argument was always one of compassion. Those who are suffering should have the opportunity to end their suffering. That's the primary reason and the foundational justification for letting down the boundaries around dying. It's only just to receive to relieve a person of the prospect that he or she will have to suffer until life escapes them. Given that they're going to die anyway, what would be the harm of hurrying it along? That was the attitude. No one, it is said, would be taking anything away from the one who had found the continuation of life intolerable. So why not just go ahead and get a jump on the natural ends of suffering in the first place, which is that a person can no longer live well? Why not just bring the dying on up from its inevitable end toward an invited finish? In the debates about the subject, it appears that no one provided a clear enough reason why not. And so, in many cases, laws were passed and the practice was regularized. There's a great deal of agitation about these laws, since they are still roundly opposed by most of the churches. Certainly the Catholic Church is a profound enemy of this way of thinking and all of the legislation and practices that result from it. Many people aren't happy knowing the laws have changed, but that opposition shouldn't be confused with the truth that there is a general societal consensus that such things, those laws, are not that big of a deal. When we start talking about life issues, this one always seems to come at the end of the discussion. It never gets the focus or the emphasis that other issues, from poverty and empowerment to abortion and education get. Most people end up talking about these other issues in terms of policies and points of view, and there's usually a great deal of friction involved when they're discussed. But it feels like none of this ignites a powerful response to the end-of-life issues like euthanasia, which is why it seems to have become woven into the unspoken part of societal arrangements much more silently. It just doesn't get that much attention. Perhaps it is the case because aging and the end of life is more often something that happens apart from our daily lives, whereas abortion or the effects of poverty are much more public. We know what a pregnant woman looks like, and we all know that pregnancy uninterrupted results in a child who can be seen and heard and whose presence touches everything. On the other hand, someone who ages and becomes decrepit often disappears into the hands of professionals, or will end up in institutional settings where their behavior and their needs become invisible. When a pregnant woman approaches the completion of her term, she comes back with a child. Her physiology and appearance revert to normal. But someone who's suffering or who becomes enfeebled slowly disappears, never to be seen again. Opting for the end of life among those who have become invisible doesn't seem to make that much of an impression. Plus, we do live in an age in which we're not given to deep thinking. I don't mean to imply that we're uniquely incapacitated in

Why End Of Life Stays Invisible

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this manner. We just happen to live at a time in which we are not conversant in the distinctions and options by which a good dialogue about the issue of a good death can be had. This isn't limited to the customers at Walmart either, or the man-in-the-street interviews. We're singularly unable to think clearly about the issues involved because we don't have the supple vocabulary or the hard reasoning available to us to make profound distinctions.

Killing Versus Letting Die

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More than 20 years ago, in a lengthy series of articles appearing in the New York Review of Books concerning end-of-life legislation, notable thinkers in many different fields contributed their thoughts to the question of whether people should be given the option of ending their own lives, and, by the way, ending the lives of those who are suffering and who are unable to make the decision for themselves. That is, the articles were about self-suicide and mercy killing. Unsurprisingly, because it was the New York Review, after all, every author supported the policies that were proposed. Euthanasia was presented as an unqualified good. In the articles, however, not one author could make a distinction between killing someone who was sick and allowing someone who was sick to die. The differences between these two practices were simply not adverted to. I know it was not because the authors didn't know the difference, they did. The distinction went unmentioned because they thought they could talk about the issue without bringing it up. In their reasoning, the patients are going to die, hurrying up their dying was the compassionate thing to do. If we tilt the dance floor so that these sick and suffering patients can shuffle off this mortal coil more quickly, then so be it. That was the conclusion. And no one said a word about the distinction between killing with intent rather than simply dying content. It was remarkable. And remarkable just because it was so obtruse and so obvious. If these experts couldn't talk about obvious distinctions and moral choices, then what are the chances the average person will talk about them? It's an example of limiting moral conversation by depriving the conversation of the words necessary to have the conversation. Imagine entering into a discussion about, well, I don't know, the road the rules about offsides when playing football. If nobody makes the distinction between American football and soccer, you don't have the language to describe the differences, you in fact don't even have the language to describe the issue. Your discussion isn't going to amount to anything useful or productive. So it's no wonder that these practices and the laws about them slip under our notice. As a society, we don't know what to make of them or what to make of the people who propose them. And we're pretty comfortable with the arguments about compassion, since we all want to be compassionate, so there's not a lot of notable pushback that we can get behind. Self-suicide and euthanasia are all about compassionate responses, so we hear what we can do and societally we get busy and do it. And the results are in. In most places where these laws have been passed, people do take advantage of them. They decide to end their lives in the face of their suffering. And all seems to go well enough within the medical establishment to facilitate those who want to exercise this option in their lives. Doctors are consulted, determinations are made, decisions are rendered, the appropriate means are procured, and all proceeds according to description. Someone facing a life-ending condition is helped along by these measures. It all seems to go pretty well. At least no one faces the prospect of needless suffering and prolonged pain. Compassion, it appears, wins. But of course, that's not the end of the story.

When Compassion Becomes A Weapon

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It never ends this way. Thus we get the 12-year-old who was euthanized this last summer. The formula was not quite as straightforward or quite as antiseptic as first envisioned by those who proposed these means. When the laws were being debated, no one mentioned that they could be used to kill someone who had not yet reached middle age, much less who had not yet come to adulthood. It didn't take all that long for a law proposed to relieve the intolerable suffering as the consequence of old age to be used to relieve older people of the intolerable burden of caring for someone too young to yet have had a kiss. It always happens this way. Making way for the killing of oneself opens the doorway to selfless killing of another. What begins as a suicide ends as homicide. It always does. We might take a quote from the author Flannery O'Connor about this matter. She wrote, quote, In the absence of faith now, we govern by tenderness. It's a tenderness which, cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends up in forced labor camps and the fumes of the gas chamber, unquote. Right now we don't have gas chambers, but we do have the justification for compassionate care ending in the kindness of killing. That's the shocking part of the story. They killed this girl because they were concerned for her. The logic isn't that foreign to us. I heard a presentation more than 20 years ago given by a hospital chaplain who advocated that we provide the means to end the suffering of patients who've lived too long. His reasoning was that we wouldn't let one of our pets suffer, we'd put them down out of our concern for them. So why not do the same for grandma? In his mind, it was only a matter of doing the right thing. He wasn't a monster. He was just thinking of how to address the hard questions when grandma becomes old and feeble and hurting and alone. Who could object to having grandma slowly fade from the tough future she faces as her life ebbs away, all the while sweetened by knowing that she had chosen to end it all? That was his notion. It was only logical. I was part of his talk because I was with a group of deaf parishioners from Holy Angels Parish, where I was pastor. I'm sure his sincerity was well placed. He did minister to the old and infirm every day, after all. He just didn't want them to suffer any more than they had to. And in this, we feel a common emotion. The threads tying all these reactions together is our concern to do the right thing for those whose lives have come to their logical conclusion. As we talk in reason, it's not hard to decide to hurry along those whose end draws close. But I wonder if he knew that death had a stake in preserving the value of life even when others think it might not be worth it. I doubt he'd thought that much about it. They didn't think compassionate killing was a good response to intractable conditions. They were deaf, after all. However, the conversation always moves in this direction. We want to do the right thing for the right people, and we ignore those who might not fit our comfortable definitions. In addition, the understanding that we're not monstrous, especially as we watch the harsh suffering so many of the elder undergo, enables us to make the decisions necessary to achieve something like a good life. And we do, and we do it by hurrying on with the conclusion of a good death. What could be wrong if our intentions are good, the goal is good, and the results are good? In every case in which euthanasia has been argued, those elements are present. And in the deliberations that result, they always carry the day. It's no accident we've reversed our aversion to self-imolation. And in the many countries and states in which these policies have been enabled and facilitated, these convictions are first and foremost. But there's always more to the story, of course, which is why this news item is so appropriate.

What Happens After Boundaries Break

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The decision to end a life never ends with our good intentions. Good intentions always open the door to other conclusions. G.K. Chesterton said once that if you run into a fence crossing an otherwise open road with no obvious boundary, it's important to ask around and to run down the road for a ways before you tear the fence down. Who knows what it marks out or constrains? So it is with our boundaries on the values of life. If we let the fence around down, if we let the fence around them down, we're liable to find that our good intentions have brought us more than good results. The first result, Beyond the Bounds, is that once we've defined the care of persons to include their right to die when they want, to hurry along the inevitable, we find there's no real boundary to the hurrying. If a person is 95 years old and suffers from terminal cancer and wants to end her life, it's easy to agree that we're being compassionate to interrupt her suffering and to hurry her to her inevitable end. But once the boundary is crossed, why not offer the same to the person who's 45? Is there any real difference once we countenance killing? And if not cancer, but congestive heart failure, do the same rules apply? This is a disease you'll die of, but one that you can live with for a long time. Do we agree to suicide right away or only later? How about losing a limb or our looks or our potency or our purpose? Would we agree to provide the poisons if someone encountered those obstacles to a full life? How about being deaf or blind or depressed or disagreeable? How about being poor, addicted, fat, or Jewish? What exactly would be the limit once the limit is pierced? It turns out there isn't one. Neither age, nor condition, nor situation, nor intention matters. Once our policy is that a good death means somebody else facilitates my death. The second result is that once we've determined that the value of life has to do with what a good life produces, it doesn't take long to decide that there are useless lives. Once we come to this conclusion, it's easy to push those lives off to the side. If a 94-year-old with cancer who lives in pain has a life that has become useless to everyone else, we can easily make the decision that it harms no one and helps her to end her life. She's helping no one by continuing to live. But if such a life is useless in itself to those around her, what are the boundaries of another's life? Who says, and when it when it's said, is that that another life is valuable or not? Is a 34-year-old with cancer living a valuable life? How about someone who suffers from opioid addiction, or is his life valuable enough to preserve, or can he decide to end it? Can another decide that it should be ended since it's not valuable enough to continue? Again, once the boundaries are pierced, we soon find out there aren't any substantial ones left. And even if letting the obstacles go and opting to end life is for the good intention of helping another, when the decision is made in all sincerity, it opens the way to make other decisions less direct and less helpful. All it takes is enough time to become used to making these evaluations and then becoming comfortable with death as a solution. Becoming comfortable killing a 12-year-old is a logical conclusion to the decision to begin killing with a 94-year-old. Compassion, as the only measure, eventually begins to pervert the entire system of care and concern. This isn't some abstract, far-fetched conclusion. It's the matter of fact that uh the matter-of-fact that Flannery O'Connor mentions, beginning with deciding on the appropriate measures of the values of life with all sincere compassion, and pretty soon the conversation moves away from how to be compassionate and care to what the measures of compassion really are. After a while it becomes obvious that there are no inbuilt restraints to what we're capable of. Compassion can kill if there are no other measures involved, if by it we mean the desire to help and to aid according to our own definitions. We won't be able to help ourselves. We'll begin to craft a definition in line with what we want of another rather than what the other demands of us. This change in perspective, focusing on our own response rather than on the needs or the value of another's life, is like putting sand in a transmission. It causes the gears to wear and then fail.

Bureaucracy, Money, And Coercion

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This is especially true of the medical establishment that thinks only on the most basic and explicit level. A personal evaluation of a situation or a difficulty can be intricate in its awareness of the many factors or levels of complication and nuance. But when a bureaucracy becomes involved, all nuances easily go out the window. Only the most basic and straightforward factors become important in the decisions made. For example, in the process of decision-making about assisted suicide, for example, the intended policy of being compassionate didn't take into account that killing a patient is a lot cheaper than caring for. As we opt for compassionate care by turning suffering into suicide, focusing on relieving pain is good. But it doesn't take long before everyone understands that a cold corpse is easier to handle than a fragile patient. And in a profession always overburdened by expanding needs, it becomes no more than the effect of gravity to begin moving toward the lowest point. It becomes easy to decide that real compassion is to eliminate the one who needs the most attention. Once compassion begins to include killing, it doesn't take long for killing to become a preferred option. And it doesn't take long to justify it either. After all, if we look at the care of others in terms of the allocation of resources, it's easy to create a formula in which real compassion is exercised by directing what we have toward those with the best chances. This decision for true compassion then allows us to decide those others who are left on the other side of the line of efficiently used, f efficiently useful treatment are not valuable enough to deserve care. And once that decision is made, all strictly in line with what's compassionate and useful in the whole process of care, it doesn't take long for treatment to include assisted dying. Once assisted dying is an option, it's only a short distance to assisted killing. After all, if we're doing everyone a favor in the long run by helping inefficient patients to end their own lives, we certainly can be helpful by directly ending the lives of those whose inefficiency includes their unwillingness to die. Assisted dying quickly becomes assisted killing, which is Flannery O'Connor's point. It's also the explicit history of this topic. Institutional assistance in suicide becomes bureaucratic insistence on death. This is simply the measure of money and resources. It's not that hard to imagine what can result when other factors are woven into these decisions as they always are. When grandmother begins to understand that assisted suicide, as defined as something compassionate and helpful, she can feel burdened by knowing that her life might be taking something away from her grandkids. So she can feel the imperative from their needs to go ahead and take her own life for them. Compassionate killing isn't only from the ones who benefit. It, but also from the ones victimized. And it's a short journey from what grandma thinks about herself and what she can do for her grandkids to have the grandkids beginning to expect grandma to make the right decision right now. If the hovering expectation is for a loving grandmother to do what's correct and just and decent, it's only opposite for her to decide to say goodbye at the appropriate time. And from that common practice quickly becomes the expectation that if grandma can't decide on her own, others could compassionately help her reach the right conclusion. This is simply one of the effects when care includes in its armamentarium of treatment the power of death. When killing becomes a treatment, it certainly will be prescribed. And we all know that it doesn't take long for treatment to move from option to imposition. After a while, a generation or two at most, compassionate treatment will become coerced conclusions, letting down the boundaries between letting die and killing, and soon killing becomes unstoppable. Compassion, apart from the origin of compassion, leads to the gas chamber. Well, if not the gas chambers exactly right now, then to the hospital bed where a 12-year-old is exterminated because her life doesn't measure up to our yardstick. Remember, these elements in the practice of assisted dying are not theoretical. They're already in place.

The Culture Shift And Personal Fallout

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Medical assistance in dying in Canada already accounts for one in twenty deaths there nationally. That might not seem all that great, merely 5%. But when it was promoted and enacted, it was described as being an option only for the last resort in treatment, to be done only very, very rarely. The percentage has grown every year. We all know it will become larger and include more people, especially as health care costs rise. Most especially, we know it will include a wider and wider swath of the population, not just the elderly, the terminal, or the hopeless. Self-suicide becomes the culture of suicide, which becomes the suicide of culture. It's happening now. The other curious part of this promotion of compassionate killing is that it involves those who are doing the promoting in intimate and powerful ways. It is possible to promote abortion, for example, and be unaffected by the outcome of that promotion. If you're not pregnant or involved with someone who is pregnant, the question about abortion would at least be one remove away from the practical decision-making you have. But euthanasia and its ultimate outplaying of assistance killing has the potential to affect everyone. Those who promote this option in society are certainly the ones who can be empowered and threatened by its impact in their lives. Why would someone promote killing of oneself that soon that soon leads to the killing of others if it ultimately makes his or her life more vulnerable? In Robert Hugh Benson's novel, one of the main characters is a legislator who has promoted assisted suicide his whole career. After a series of unfortunate decisions, his wife decides to kill herself at one of the local suicide clinics. She does this without talking to him. It's her decision, after all. And she does it in order to protect her husband's reputation from her wild thinking, which includes her flirtation with religion, especially her thoughts about becoming a Catholic. In the novel, her husband is first depressed and then outraged when she when he finds out what she's done. His promotion of the practice never once included the notion that it might touch him personally. For him, it was always about having control over your own life. When he found out the right the right included having someone decide that his need for control cost another her life, he's dumbfounded. Those who promote self-killing continued to imagine their personal boundaries are safe. They never imagined the power in piercing those boundaries might consume them. But of course, it will. If we want to be truly compassionate, our decision-making has to include protecting those advocates from themselves by protecting everyone from their policies. In protecting the value of life, we protect our own lives from our wildest and most immoral selves. The life we save will be our own. Back in just a moment.

Faith In Verse And Closing

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Welcome back to our final segment, Faith in Verse. We have a poem called A Few Minutes of TV. In the doctor's waiting room, I watched a few minutes of TV. Oh, it was the annual exam, nothing traumatic to see. The program had a couple of gals rebuilding a log house with the help of a couple of experts who were called out. There were descriptions of new walls, a bathroom in a different place, the chance to alter the most needed, a moment of benevolence and grace. These shows are popular, I guess. They're everywhere after all. Nothing more attractive than new beginnings, a spring from fall. Don't we also have this desire to find something new? Hidden there among the old walls, a new scene from the old view? So we can hope, whether from broad nature or refined grace, we can discover the possible promise that there within lies a new place. That's a few minutes of TV. We're here every week. I hope that you can continue to join us in exploring what it means to be Living Catholic.

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Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okr.org.