A Matter of Life and Death

I’m deeply troubled by the recent news story of barely 20-year-old Michelle Carter, who was convicted of manslaughter in the death of her 18-year-old boyfriend, Conrad Roy III. The court found her guilty on the strength of numerous text messages she sent to Roy, urging him to follow through on his many threats to take his own life.

I would counter that we can’t feed our youth a steady diet of abortion justification and euthanasia glorification, and expect them not to buy into those values.

Earlier texts from Carter emerged, in which she urged young Roy to seek help rather than end his life. One of her final communications before the boy’s suicide read, "You just need to do it Conrad or I'm gonna get you help.”

Reread that. “Ambivalent” covers that sentence the way a bikini would cover Chris Christie.

Neither does “confusion” capture what she’s expressing. The girl’s mind is downright fractured. Think about it. On one hand, she’s coercing Roy to carry out his own death; on the other, she’ll sound alarm bells if he chooses life. Kind of along the lines of, go rob that jewelry store, and if you don’t, I’ll call the cops.  

Please don’t mistake the tone I’m taking for glibness. If anything, I’m flabbergasted that we’re even having a discussion about whether Carter should be held responsible for Roy’s suicide, given our country’s love affair with death. Why isn’t America applauding her the way they oozed sympathy for Brittany Maynard’s family, who aided and abetted her decision to end her life after being diagnosed with terminal cancer? The press was positively reverential when the 29-year-old publicly trumpeted the beauty of choosing her own death in the face of a malignant brain tumor.

Again, don’t get me wrong. This poor girl was suffering beyond what I can imagine. I get that. I just don’t get that she thought the answer to her suffering was to promote a philosophy which would open the door to untold suffering for future families. Take, for example, the heart-wrenching situation of Charlie Gard’s parents, who fought tirelessly to choose life for their ailing son at their own expense, rather than accept the death sentence issued him by physicians who presumably forgot (or at least reconstructed) their Hippocratic Oath, and a court which ruled death to be in his best interest.

The Carter case also brings to mind a compelling article I read several years ago following the acquittal of Casey Anthony for the murder of her two-year-old daughter, Caylee. The author argues we ought not be surprised when our young people make murderous decisions, as they have been steeped in the Roe v. Wade culture and mindset since before they could talk. In other words, we can’t heap up an avalanche of lies and bad-think and present it as truth to our kids from the time they can gum Cheerios, and not expect them to internalize that training.

I think what prevailed in the end for Carter and Roy was the shortsightedness, not just of youth, but of society as a whole. For the moment, though, let’s stick to the main players. Carter was foolish not to consider that her texts urging Roy to carry out the deed he had long threatened could be produced as evidence against her. Roy – that poor, distraught young man – didn’t seem to realize that beyond the grave could lie greater pain than the temporary torment in which he found himself. Neither one seemed to comprehend that today’s actions lead to tomorrow’s consequences, which is something about which I could write another whole article. Suffice it to say that together they failed to recognize that present agony often gives way to future strength and character.

I know of what I speak. As a young single mother who could see no light at the end of the tunnel, for a time I saw the idea of self-harm as a valid option. Were it not for the lifelines of devoted family and caring mental health professionals, my kids might well have had to survive a preventable tragedy. I shudder to think what their fates (and mine) would have been, had the people in my sphere of influence not deemed life – even painful, arduous, inequitable life – worth living.

As a culture, we used to agree on certain assumptions. Call it the Judeo-Christian mindset or just a simple morality code, but we used to corporately concede a few core principles. Among them was the fact that life was inherently valuable and worth living, and not to be tossed aside casually when the going got tough. This included the preservation of one’s own life, as well as that of the unborn. Now, however, as Americans have become more “enlightened,” we’ve taken the lives of approximately 
60 million preborn children since 1973, and six states and the District of Columbia have adopted physician assisted suicide laws. 

Unless we reverse these trends, we will have only ourselves to blame when the next Michelle Carter or Casey Anthony practices what we’ve been preaching for the last 44 years.

I’m going to let my readers ponder these statistics and ethical questions for a bit. My next post will be an excerpt from my manuscript, Belabored, in which my protagonist, Tanya Ritter, weighs the value of life based on the final days she spent with her ailing grandparents. Stay tuned.