In November 2008, Washington became the second state (to Oregon) to legalize physician-assisted suicide (PAS). Washington’s Initiative 1000, popularly known as the Death with Dignity law, passed with an almost 60% majority and allows physicians to prescribe (but not administer) lethal doses of medication to terminally ill mentally competent patients with a prognosis of less than six months to live.
The arguments of those who oppose giving individuals the assistance they need to end their lives generally fall into two categories: Religious and Risk. A third argument…that physicians assisting in suicide violate the Hippocratic Oath…is not relevant since the Oath is no longer obligatory and has been reworded many times and is subject to varying interpretations. And individual physicians may choose not to offer such assistance.
The Religious argument is that human life is sacred in the hands of God and that only He has the magnitude to determine when it should end. To those who believe, it is the ultimate argument to ban and refrain from engaging in PAS. But one’s religious ideas, in America, may not be imposed on others. You are free to have your religious beliefs and to live by them and I am free not to have those beliefs nor be required to be subject to them. That is the essence of freedom of religion in our country. Our governmental laws have all been made subject to our inalienable right to freely choose the course of our individual lives.
The Risk arguments are predicated on the finality of suicide and the understandable concerns that some of those who opt to end their lives may do so without awareness of the possibility that their condition may have been misdiagnosed or may go into remission, or may choose to do so for what are considered insufficient reasons (e.g., not wishing to be a burden to family), or may be, in their weakened condition, unduly induced to elect suicide by others who may benefit from that choice.
But the Risk arguments involve protocol not principle. Appropriate procedures can be established, as were done in Oregon. to raise to a high level of human certainty that the risks have been minimized or eliminated.
The patient electing suicide must make at least two separate requests two weeks apart and two physicians must approve the prescription of lethal medication. Additional precautions can be taken.
In the eleven years since Oregon implemented its PAS law, 341 people have terminated their lives. But for one individual who was approved for PAS and is alive today two years after he was told he had less than six months to live, there is no indication that the law is not working as intended.
The argument that someone may choose suicide for what is considered an insufficient or inappropriate reason is rooted in the popular but misguided parental view of government. The function of government is not to protect an individual from himself – or herself – but the precise opposite: it is to protect each individual’s freedom to choose the scope of his life.
It is an obscene double-cross for the government, set up to protect freedom, to impose its standards for living in denial of an individual’s right to choose otherwise. And for the government to do so in the name of upholding ethics is ludicrous: the denial of freedom is never ethical. Man’s natural capacity and need to make choices is what spawns the need for an ethical code.
We mercifully put injured horses to sleep to take them out of their misery; in 48 states, we do not extend that mercy to humans, we do not grant them the relief, the escape, they seek from a painful life that has all but ended.
The right to choose death is not, as some say, a separate issue from our constitutionally guaranteed right to life. It is the right to life. The right to say YES is the right not to say YES. Sustaining life takes effort, more for some than for others. Each day, we consciously or otherwise choose life by choosing to do those things that sustain and enrich our lives…or we choose death by making contrary choices. We have no alternative in this regard. There is no such thing as the right to life absent the right to death.
By any measure, the two most important days in our life are the day we are born and the day we die. The former is not within our choice, the latter should be.
Human life is sacred, if sacred means of supreme value…sacred in the hands of the individual.
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