The phrase I return to from Elaina Plott Calabro’s article is just eight words, spoken by the family physician Jonathan Reggler: once you accept that life is not sacred. With those words, Reggler explains better than anyone the horrifying expansion of euthanasia in Canada, my home country. Because regardless of whether you reckon that there is anything divine or even vaguely numinous in this world, sacred remains the best and most morally urgent word that human beings have for talking about life.