Got this from a colleague, and thought it was worth discussing.  I, like
my colleague, am horrified by some of the statements.

 

Kendall 

 

An unreasonable man (but my wife says that's redundant!)

 

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.

 

-George Bernard Shaw 1856-1950

 

 

"We never say no." 
The right-to-die movement abandons pretense. 
by Wesley J. Smith 
04/27/2006 12:00:00 AM 

 

THERE IS A PRETENSE in contemporary assisted suicide advocacy that goes
something like this: "Aid in dying" (as it is euphemistically called) is
merely to be a safety valve, a last resort only available to imminently
dying patients for whom nothing else can be done to alleviate suffering.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the founder of the Swiss suicide
facilitating organization Dignitas is just about done with pretense. The
Sunday Times Magazine (London) reported
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-2121731,00.html>  that
Dignitas' founder, Ludwig Minelli, plans to create sort of a Starbucks
for suicide: a chain of death centers "to end the lives of people with
illnesses and mental conditions such as chronic depression."

Minelli believes that all suicidal people should be given information
about the best way to kill themselves, and, according to the Times
story, "if they choose to die, they should be helped to do it properly."
Dignitas admits to having assisted the suicides of many people who were
not terminally ill. As Minelli succinctly put it, "We never say no."

The story about Minelli illuminates a deep ideological belief within the
euthanasia movement: that we own our bodies, and thus, determining the
time, manner, and method of our own deaths, for whatever reason, is a
basic human right.

That is certainly how one of the other superstars of the international
euthanasia movement, the Australian physician Phillip Nitschke, sees it.
Nitschke travels the world presenting how-to-commit-suicide clinics.
Several years ago he was paid thousands of dollars by the Hemlock
Society (now merged into the assisted suicide advocacy group Compassion
and Choices) to create a suicide concoction made from common household
ingredients (a formula he calls the "Peaceful Pill").

Like Minelli, Nitschke is straightforward about his goals. In a 2001
interview, National Review Online asked him who should qualify for the
Peaceful Pill. He responded:

	My personal position is that if we believe that there is a right
to life, then we must accept that people have a right to dispose of that
life whenever they want . . . So all people qualify, not just those with
the training, knowledge, or resources to find out how to "give away"
their life. And someone needs to provide this knowledge, training, or
resource necessary to anyone who wants it, including the depressed, the
elderly bereaved, [and] the troubled teen.

Nitschke and Minelli's position has a large constituency among
euthanasia believers. Indeed, over the years, the movement has left many
telltale signs that assisted suicide is not intended ultimately to be
restricted to the imminently dying.

Take the "Zurich Declaration,"
<http://www.worldrtd.net/about/page/?id=560>  issued at the 1998
bi-annual convention of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies.
(The WFRD is an umbrella group made up of 37 national euthanasia
advocacy organizations, including Compassion and Choices and Hemlock
founder Derek Humphry's Euthanasia Research and Guidance Organization,
or ERGO.) It states:

	We believe that we have a major responsibility for ensuring that
it becomes legally possible for all competent adults, suffering severe
and enduring distress, to receive medical help to die, if this is their
persistent, voluntary and rational request. We note that such medical
assistance is already permitted in The Netherlands, Switzerland and
Oregon, USA.

It should also be noted that one need not be dying or even sick to
experience "severe and enduring distress."

SUPPORT FOR A BROAD AND LIBERAL ACCESS to suicide extends far beyond
activists in the euthanasia movement. It has been embraced by some
people in the mental health professions, where a concept known as
"rational suicide" is being promoted in professional journals, books,
and at symposia.

Typical of this genre is a 1998 article by James W. Werth published in
the journal Crisis, with the ironic title, "Using Rational Suicide as an
Intervention to Prevent Irrational Suicide." Werth urges that mental
health professionals should not always save the lives of suicidal
patients, but instead, should non-judgmentally facilitate the suicidal
person's decision making process. If the professional agrees that the
desire to die is rational, then the suicide should be permitted, or
perhaps even assisted. 

To qualify for a rational suicide, the patient would have to demonstrate
to the mental health professional that he has a "hopeless condition,"
which Werth defines as, "terminal illnesses, severe physical and/or
psychological pain, physically or mentally debilitating and/or
deteriorating conditions, or qualify of life no longer acceptable to the
individual." This is circular thinking. By definition, if one is
suicidal, he has a quality of life that he believes is no longer
acceptable.

Not surprisingly, assisted rational suicide is already permitted in the
Netherlands where the Dutch Supreme Court approved a psychiatrist's
facilitating the death of a distraught woman who wanted to die because
her children were dead. 

Similar suicide-friendly attitudes are often expressed among mainstream
bioethicists--and not just by Princeton's Peter Singer. For example, the
University of Utah's Margaret Pabst Battin suggests that "suicide can be
rationally chosen," to "avoid pain and suffering in terminal illnesses,"
as a "self-sacrifice for altruistic reasons," or in cases of "suicides
of honor and principle." Along these same lines, Julian Savulescu, an
up-and-comer in the international bioethics community, argues that
respect for human freedom demands that society permit the suicides of
competent persons--even when they are expressing an "unjustified desire
to die."

"Some freedoms are worth the cost of innocent life," Savulescu wrote in
a chapter for the book Assisted Suicide. "The freedom to finish one's
life when and how one chooses is, it seems to me, about as important as
any freedom." 

The right to receive assisted suicide for virtually any reason is
especially popular among self-declared "free thinkers" and humanists.
Thus, Tom Flynn, the editor of Free Inquiry, the house organ for the
Council for Secular Humanism, wrote in the Spring 2003 issue, that the
belief in human liberty must include an unfettered right to die. "While
suicide has never been exactly popular, a new assault on our right to
suicide is brewing. It's something secular humanists ought to resist."
Why? Because Flynn (and other humanists) believe fervently that a right
to suicide is a crucial element of human liberty:

	What's really in play here is the old dogma that individuals
don't own their own lives. Physician-assisted suicide is but part of the
issue. If we trust our fellow humans to choose their occupations, their
significant others, their political persuasions, and their stances on
religion, we should also defend their right to dispose of their most
valuable possessions--their lives--even if disposing of life is
precisely the choice they make.

There are even ongoing discussions in bioethics suggesting that some
people might have an ethical obligation to commit suicide. Thus, a 1997
cover story in the prestigious bioethics journal the Hastings Center
Report, philosopher John Hardwig argued that there is not only a right,
but also a "duty to die":

	A duty to die is more likely when continuing to live will impose
significant burdens--emotional burdens, extensive caregiving,
destruction of life plans, and yes, financial hardship--on your family
and loved ones. This is the fundamental insight underlying a duty to
die. 

	A duty to die becomes greater as you grow older. As we age, we
will be giving up less by giving up our lives . . . To have reached the
age of say, seventy-five or eighty years without being ready to die is
itself a moral failing, the sign of a life out of touch with life's
basic realities.

Bioethicist Battin has also supported the concept of an eventual duty to
die for those living in rich countries, not just to spare burdening our
loved ones but to promote world egalitarianism. Thus, she wrote in a
book chapter called "Global Life Expectancies and the Duty to Die" that
the time may come when we will have the moral obligation to "conserve
health care resources by forgoing treatment or directly ending [our]
life" toward promoting "health prospects and life expectancies" that are
more equal around the globe. 

DESPITE THIS THICKENING ATMOSPHERE of suicide permissiveness, most
assisted suicide advocates in this country continue to insist that "all"
they want is for the terminally ill to have access to hastened death.

For some, clearly, this is a mere political tactic. The ultimate goal is
a much broader death license. Others may actually mean for the initial
terminal illness limitation to be permanent, believing that "restricted"
assisted suicide, once accepted widely, would not spread to ever
widening swaths of acceptable killing (as it has in the Netherlands).

Which camp one decides best represents the overall euthanasia movement
doesn't really matter. Once assisted suicide is accepted in law and
culture, the premises of radical autonomy and allowing killing to
alleviate human suffering would conjoin, unleashing the irresistible
power of logic that would push us inexorably toward the humanist nirvana
of death on demand.

Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, an
attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted
Suicide, and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and
Culture. His website is wesleyjsmith.com <http://www.wesleyjsmith.com/>
.

Correction appended, 4/27/06: The article originally stated that the Tom
Flynn Free Inquiry piece appeared in the April 19, 2006 issue. Instead,
the Flynn article appeared in the Spring 2003 issue. 

 

(c) Copyright 2006, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights
Reserved. 

 


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