Make dead
Today the CBC was having its discussion about assisted suicide, and whether it should be legal. (Background note! Some mother just helped her 36ish year old son with MS to kill himself.)
There were some interesting arguments:
- If you can get help killing yourself, you’re not likely to rush to do it while you’re still capable of it. This one seemed fairly reasonable to me: if you know you’re not going to lose the chance, you won’t hurry up to die.
- If there were better pain control, fewer people would want to kill themselves. Whatever, Margaret Somerville. (Yes, this was the very first argument she put forth. No, I have never liked her.)
- I have a disability and it’s worse than the guy who died’s was! I don’t want to die. I used to imagine if I were in a wheelchair I’d prefer to die, but it turns out I’m happier than I used to be, though of course I’d prefer not to be in a wheelchair. People project their own fears onto people with disabilities (very true), so that guy was probably just responding to that and didn’t actually want to die.
- The fact that the exception is carved out for (a) people who have terminal diseases; (b) people who have incurable, painful diseases; and (c) people with disabilities is bigotry. Lots of people with disabilities don’t want to die. Plus it’s offensive to call it courageous, especially since people call suicide-because-of-depression tragic (oddly, this was in response to someone who called any suicide courageous, but tragic)
- Anyone who wants to die should be helped/allowed to, if you can’t talk them out of it. (This is where I lean, though I realise there need to be lots of checks in the system first.)
The entire debate was fascinating. I — perhaps — got in too late, but I had no idea what the host felt about assisted suicide. But it’s interesting the facets people have about it: people who knew others with terminal illnesses tended to be for it; people with disabilities, against. Psychiatric illnesses were kept mostly excluded, which is too bad, because I think that this is where the most interesting discussion comes, in the intersection between untreatable cancer (say) and untreatable depression.
The other side is how much help should you be given. Should doctors be allowed to prescribe fatal overdoses, as long as you take them yourself? Should you need to have 2 doctors saying okay? Should doctors — or family members — be allowed to help? At what point does it go from helping to pushing? Can you leave a living will that says “once I get to this stage, I want to die, I want to be killed”? Is it truly more ethical to say “well, yes, you want to die, but it’s wrong to make you dead, so we’re stuck”?
What was interesting is how well-thought out the pro-euthanasia group’s arguments were, especially in comparison to the anti-euthanasia group. (After the idiotic comments about pain control — not that it’s untrue, not that pain control isn’t an issue, but that the presence or absence of such doesn’t say much about the morality of euthanasia — Margaret Somerville had much more informative comments about the abuses of the system in the Netherlands, and the better system in place in Oregon.)
October 4th, 2004 at 8:45 pm
This is a really interesting post. And an important topic.
I often wonder why we think we have the right to tell people they cannot die when we have not the right (okay, the U.S. government and much of public opinion holds a different and fairly inconsistent view on this point) to tell them tell them they cannot live.
And, obviously, as you mention in your last bullet point, even the hint of coercion must be removed from the equation.
October 4th, 2004 at 10:24 pm
It’s a topic I don’t often think about — luckily, it’s not come up in my life as such. But in general, it seems absurd to me that we make it so hard for people to choose how to end their lives. No, we don’t want every single teenager in the world to buy legal overdoses of morphine, but I also don’t feel it’s right to say “Alzheimer’s yes, MS no, depression only after you’ve tried these drugs and these therapies, schizophrenia okay, etc” — which is why I find the listing disturbing. And there were interesting points about how we devalue people with disabilities (and the elderly, honestly) in the framing of this debate. In the end, it’s a 9 days wonder in the media; I doubt the conversation will go further.