Suicide. There are more and more of them in this world and for more and more reasons, but this column is going to concentrate today on physician assisted suicide which for some God forsaken reason is legal in only five states in this country; Washington, Oregon, Montana, New Mexico and Vermont.
For the last twenty years the majority of Americans have agreed that we should have physician-assisted suicide available to us, especially when we face an undesirable medical future. But interestingly enough less than 50% of Americans think about or plan for such an event when it is something that most of them will face as they age.
Brittany Maynard, a young woman facing a horrible death by brain cancer brought this whole question to the fore by electing assisted suicide, but there are many in this country that would foil her in her choice of a painless and dignified death. Why? Why do only 58% of Americans favor doctor-assisted suicide and why do many others fight to thwart the practice by those facing painful, horrible deaths? Well, the biggest opposition seems to come from those true believers, with a strong religious, mostly Christian, ethos. The argument is most often made that God gave us life and we do not have the right to discard it. This, of course, is based on the supposition that God gave us life, a hypothesis that is anything but provable since it is based on faith and ideology, not on evidence.
Brittany Maynard refered to her decision as a personal choice and initially, it would seem that is the case, but there are those like Dr. Ira Biak, a palliative care physician, who have another point of view. Dr. Biak sees this decision not as a personal one but as a social one, because the doctor who assists in this action has been trained, regulated, supported and paid by others, making it inarguably a social act on his part. So what?
The procedure is legal in five states because the citizens of those five states have, voted for it, very definitely a social act on their part. But whether it’s a personal decision or a social one is irrelevant. It’s an act for which there is no obvious downside either personally or socially.
There are many who will argue this point, as there always are; on both religious and social grounds but that doesn’t make those arguments valid. I realize that the religion mongers love to call this a Christian nation but even a brief perusal of the constitution reveals that our founders, even those who were religious themselves understood the dangers of religious influence on government and did everything they could think of, to establish the fact that religion should have no influence on the government of this country.
That said, the reality is, that religion has had very much to say about how this country is run, some good and some bad.
Ms Maynard died Saturday, one would hope, painlessly and with the dignity that she sought. If she did, it was no thanks to those who believed that their religious beliefs gave them the right to interfere with her life and with decisions that had nothing to do with them.
In this case the problems caused the late Ms Maynard by mostly religious groups fighting the concept of assisted suicide were cruel and unnecessary. This beautiful young woman realized that her days were few and wished only to spend what time she had left with her new husband and then die with dignity. Why was it anyone’s business to get in the way of that simple desire? I have no idea if she was a believer. It should be fairly obvious from this article that I am not. But it is very clear to me, that if some true believer wants to die in excruciating agony to please a deity to whose principles he or she subscribes, it isn’t my place to stop them, just as is wasn’t some religious fanatic’s place to force Ms Maynard and her family to uproot their lives and move a thousand miles away to find a place where she could die with peace and dignity.
The question really becomes, why isn’t this procedure legal in the other 45 states? It seems there are two principle reasons, First is that very few people want to deal with the reality of end of life so even though a majority of citizens agree with the concept of assisted suicide most of them shy away from getting involved in anything that brings up the idea of they, themselves dying. Hence, very little interest in pushing this agenda. Most people do not even have living wills or other documents that would deal with choices when they are nearing death. Most leave no guidelines for their next of kin; either because they have not discussed it at all or because the next of kin do not support their choices.
We all have physical ailments that slow us down as we age, but certain ailments will eventually take away our humanity. When those ailments reach the state where they no longer support the mind’s ability to function, to take in and process information, we will have reached a state where a person no longer has a reason to exist. We will be vegetative and that is a state for plants, not people. At that point we must have already made the end of life decision or we will simply exist in a state that has no human function or one that strips resources from a world that desperately needs them for more important purposes.
The second factor that works against the universal availability of doctor assisted suicide, is, as stated above, religion, primarily the various Christian denominations and as usual in those areas it has more to do with the, what I’ve been told God wants, rather than the, what is good for society, realities.
This discussion has always been clouded by those with a fear that any kind of legal suicide that isn’t committed by the person in question could lead to various kinds of murder or to the creation of death panels who could dictate when a person is no longer productive in society and therefore that they have become a disposable burden to the state. Such arguments have been around a long time but they are all proposed by those who cannot come up with any reasonable one to forbid assisted suicide by a reasoning person who is dying and just wants help to slip out of this life with some degree of comfort and dignity.
It’s time we abandoned these manufactured fears and move into a world that is geared to the needs of human beings rather than those of misguided religious proselytizers.