The sanctity of life is, of course, a religious or transcendental concept, and has no meaning otherwise; if there is no God, life cannot have sanctity. By the same token, the quality of life is an earthly or worldly concept, and can only be expressed legalistically, and in materialist terms; the soul does not come into it.

It follows, at the end of our life span, that geriatrics unable any longer to offer in the way of aesthetic, carnal and egotistic satisfaction - in other words by virtue of their years losing out on quality of life - should be subjected to euthanasia or mercy-killing, and discreetly murdered.

On this basis, for instance, Beethoven would scarcely have been allowed to be born; his heredity and family circumstances were atrocious, a case history of syphilis, deafness and insanity. Today his mother's pregnancy would be considered irresponsible and as requiring to be terminated.

Dr. Johnson, when he was born, was scrofulous, and already showed signs of the nervous disorders which plagued him all his life. He, too, under present conditions, would probably not have been allowed to survive.

Imagine a young girl, unmarried and pregnant, who insists that the Holy Ghost is responsible for her pregnancy, and that its outcome, according to a vision she has been vouchsafed, would be the birth of a long-awaited Messiah.

Not much quality of life potential there, I fancy, and it wouldn't take the pregnancy and family planning pundits long to decide that our Saviour, while still at the fetus stage, should be thrown away in hospital waste.

....To quieten any qualms Christians might have about abortion on demand, an Anglican bishop has devised an appropriate prayer for use on the occasion of an abortion which received the approval of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

It runs "Into Thy hands we commit in trust the developing life we have cut short" - though whether with the idea of God's continuing the interrupted development elsewhere, or of extinguishing in Heaven the life that was never born on earth is not clear.

In the case of euthanasia, a hymn may seem more in keeping with the occasion - " The life thou gavest Lord, we've ended ..." Euthanasia, it is true, has not yet been legalised except in some American states, but notoriously it is being practised on an ever-increasing scale.

Already among old people there is reluctance to go into government institutions for fear of being done away with. As for governments - hard pressed financially as they all now are, and unable to economise on defence expenditure for fear of laying themselves open to the charge of jeopardising national security, or on welfare expenditure for fear of losing votes - will they not look ever more longingly at the possibility of making substantial savings by the simple expedient of mercy-killing off the inmates of institutions for the incurably sick, the senile old, the mentally deranged and other such?

With abortions and family planning ensuring a zero population growth rate, and euthanasia disposing of useless mouths among the debilitated old, besides mopping up intervening freaks, the pursuit of happiness should be assured of at any rate financial viability. ...To destroy life, be it in a fertilised ovum one second after conception, or in some octogenarian or sufferer from a fatal illness, is the denial of life and so the antithesis of love.

In life-denying terms, as we have seen, compassion easily becomes a holocaust; garden suburbs and gulags derive from the same quest for quality of life, and the surgeon's knife can equally be used to sustain and extinguish life."

"Love toward men, but love without belief in God, very naturally leads to the greatest coercion over men, and turns their lives completely into hell on earth" Dostoevski.

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