But then, the same may be said of every life. Each one of us is alive only by the statistically impossible coincidence of our parents' meeting. We live in the shadow of our certain death, knowing that whatever happiness or success we enjoy may be snatched from us at any moment, with the same flippant randomness that accounted for our conception, or mocked by a long and painful decline.

It is the lot of every one of us to suffer and die. Still we live, allied in brief defiance of our fate. Though each life is unique, it is life itself, the immense and universal fact of being, that binds us together. However much of our existence remains a mystery, we do know this, we must: that no one's life is less than another's, that life is "larger than life," that the purpose of life is to live. In such knowledge alone is moral action possible.

There can be no qualification to our humanity. There are not half-lives or quarter-lives. There is only life. When we lose hold of that truth, when we put the quality of life ahead of its reality, we let slip with it all hope of human decency. Which is what we have been doing for many years: without the fixed compass of a reverence for life, life for its own sake, we are lost, forced to take our bearings from a constantly shifting status quo. It is new; it is shocking for a time; but soon it is no longer new, and we are no longer shocked. We are sliding so fast down the slippery slope we hardly notice the milestones as they pass.

There used to be a debate over abortion. We are informed that it is over. It's only a fetus, after all, a clump of cells, a zygote. That can't be life, can it? And having established a generalized right to abortion, we can really have no objection if the same right is asserted in the particular: to select one sex or the other, or to control for certain genetic defects. It is now almost a given to abort in cases of Down syndrome. Who can object? Who would want that sort of life? Indeed, why not spare the child a life with cystic fibrosis, or multiple sclerosis, or muscular dystrophy? Why not abort for manic depression, or deafness, or as the Nobel laureate James Watson suggests, dyslexia? Why not?

And if such judgments can be made before the fact, why not after? A Winnipeg couple is suing their doctor for "wrongful life." They were promised a healthy baby; they were delivered a Down's child. Had they known, they would have aborted. The case moves a university ethicist to muse "whether certain kinds of life are worse than no life at all." The disabled may draw the appropriate conclusions. As, it seems, did Tracy's father.

Hence Canada's newest folk hero: a man who poisoned his daughter with carbon monoxide, then told police she died in her sleep. It is widely agreed that his sentence was too harsh, that he should never have been charged: indeed, that he did the right thing. She was, we are told, unable to walk or talk; she had the mind of a three-month-old baby; she was in pain. We are invited thus to salute his crime as an act of compassion. From which we must conclude that those parents who wilfully refuse to kill their crippled children simply lack compassion. Perhaps they should be prosecuted.

It is revealing how instantly the link was made in the public mind with Sue Rodriguez and the issue of assisted suicide. Her supporters protest the two cases are wholly different, the one deceased having decided on her own to die, the other having had that decision made on her behalf. But the beatification of Mr. Latimer, like that of Ms. Rodriguez, suggests what was really at stake in each case. It never was about rights or dignity. It was and is about death. It is for having chosen death that they are celebrated.

What begins in relativism ends in nihilism. A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured.