Concerning the twin's release, Lowry describes in detail the release room in the Nurturing Center. Her style is straightforward, and her tone is foreboding. Suspense builds as The Giver insists in a very firm voice that Jonas be quiet and watch the video recording of the release. Jonas wants to see a release because he thinks that a release is a celebration; he's never had a clue that it is anything else. In an "ordinary room," Jonas' father, talking to the newborn twins, uses the "special voice" that he always uses with newborns. Everything appears to be as it should. Jonas watches as his father sends the heavier newborn twin off to the Nurturing Center and then gives a hypodermic shot into the lighter twin's head. Jonas figures that this shot is a routine vaccination that all newchildren get. He expects that his father is going to make the baby as "comfy" as possible before sending it to Elsewhere. But as Jonas looks at the now-motionless baby, he sees the same blank look on the baby's face that he saw on the dead soldier's face in the memory of warfare. Now Jonas knows that his father has killed the baby. Release means death.
After the video ends, The Giver tells Jonas that Rosemary asked to inject herself at her release. She committed suicide. The anguish that Jonas feels is almost too much for him to bear. He is overwhelmed with betrayal and deceit. When he realizes that his father lies about what releasing a baby means, The Giver sadly explains, "It's what he was told to do, and he knows nothing else." Jonas' community is built on lies, which Jonas first suggested at the end of Chapter 9 after he read in his training instructions that he is permitted to lie.
By describing the baby's release, a most senseless and horrifying death, Lowry reveals that the community practices infanticide, the killing of infants. The reason that infants are killed is because they are different in some way. Rosemary's suicide reveals that the community also practices a form of euthanasia — here, meaning that a person voluntarily asks to die. However, in the community, release for the elderly or as punishment for citizens who have broken the rules is a form of forced euthanasia, or murder.
