ASSISTED SUICIDE? NO WAY JOSE
Calls for assisted suicide to be legalized here today. Follows a new report from the U.K.’s Commission on Assisted Dying. It has reignited the debate over assisted suicide in Great
I would like Terry Prat and assorted PC and New Atheist brigades to please take note of the following: Assisted suicide is abhorred and illegal in virtually all nations. Abhorred by the Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths. Abhorred by the World Health Organisation, the British Medical Association, the American Medical Association… and by just about everyone who believes that God is the author of life.
Good article below:
Dying of hopelessness: A case against assisted suicide
It has been more than a decade since the state of Oregon legalized assisted suicide for the terminally ill. The Oregon legislation, it is argued, remains a proud monument to human dignity.
It has been more than a decade since the state of Oregon legalized assisted suicide for the terminally ill. The Oregon legislation, it is argued, remains a proud monument to human dignity.
Suicide spares patients from watching themselves be consumed by horrible diseases. It spares their families from watching. With the help of a legally prescribed drug overdose, sick people in Oregon control their own destinies.
For many people, the merits of assisted suicide are self-evident. Who doesn't believe in personal autonomy and the end of suffering? The case for assisted suicide seems all the stronger because those who oppose it tend to invoke religious arguments. Church teachings about the sanctity of life don't resonate very well in public policy debates.
There is, however, a non-religious case to be made against assisted suicide, and it gets stronger the closer one looks at the Oregon experiment, as a team of Oregon psychiatrists recently did. Beginning in 2006, the psychiatrists started interviewing patients who wanted to make use of the assisted suicide legislation. They discovered that one in four patients had undiagnosed clinical depression.
In most places, people who express a desire to die are evaluated for depression, and receive treatment for it. In places where assisted suicide is practised, such patients might instead receive a fatal dose of barbiturates. The researchers discovered that in 2007, not one "of the people who died by lethal ingestion in Oregon had been evaluated by a psychiatrist or a psychologist."
This secular case against assisted suicide is that assisted suicide discriminates against the sick and disabled. If an able-bodied woman tells her family that she's suicidal, they will surely intervene with psychiatric help. But if a wheelchair-bound woman with Lou Gehrig's disease tells her family the same thing, they might assume, based on social prejudices about disabilities, that the request was a sensible one.
Medical ethicists are agonizing over the case of Daniel James, a British man who last month killed himself at a Swiss clinic that offers assisted suicide.
The case is unsettling for two reasons. First, James was not suffering a terminal disease. Second, he was 23. The popular image of people who avail themselves of assisted suicide is of very ill senior citizens at the end of life. That was not James.
James was a gregarious, burly athlete who last year suffered a terrible injury during a rugby game and was paralysed from the chest down. Although he could breathe without a ventilator, he couldn't move his limbs. After the accident he tried to kill himself several times, but was unable to do so. Finally, his parents took him to the clinic in Switzerland. They were with him in the room when the overdose was administered.
By all accounts, Daniel's parents are decent people who were motivated by love. In a statement, his mother talked about how her son had finally been freed from the "prison" he felt his body had become. "What right does any human being have to tell any other that they have to live such a life, filled with terror, discomfort and indignity?" she wrote.
This is heart-wrenching. Yet, we have to wonder: Daniel said he wanted to die, this is true, but was he instead crying for help, as is the case with so many people -- able-bodied or not -- whose anguish is so great that life seems pointless?
I'm no expert on the psychology of bereavement, but I suspect that most anyone who suffers a loss of this enormity -- be it the loss of physical independence, the loss of a child, indeed the loss of your future as you envisioned it -- would question the value of living. But experience shows that with time and support, people -- at least some people -- find a way to endure and rebuild.
There is a cultural assumption that severe disability is worse than death, and so to Daniel's parents it was completely normal that their 23-year-old son wanted to die. Perhaps they were right. Maybe for Daniel, disability really would have been worse than death.
But he should have been given a chance to discover otherwise
Suicide spares patients from watching themselves be consumed by horrible diseases. It spares their families from watching. With the help of a legally prescribed drug overdose, sick people in Oregon control their own destinies.
For many people, the merits of assisted suicide are self-evident. Who doesn't believe in personal autonomy and the end of suffering? The case for assisted suicide seems all the stronger because those who oppose it tend to invoke religious arguments. Church teachings about the sanctity of life don't resonate very well in public policy debates.
There is, however, a non-religious case to be made against assisted suicide, and it gets stronger the closer one looks at the Oregon experiment, as a team of Oregon psychiatrists recently did. Beginning in 2006, the psychiatrists started interviewing patients who wanted to make use of the assisted suicide legislation. They discovered that one in four patients had undiagnosed clinical depression.
In most places, people who express a desire to die are evaluated for depression, and receive treatment for it. In places where assisted suicide is practised, such patients might instead receive a fatal dose of barbiturates. The researchers discovered that in 2007, not one "of the people who died by lethal ingestion in Oregon had been evaluated by a psychiatrist or a psychologist."
This secular case against assisted suicide is that assisted suicide discriminates against the sick and disabled. If an able-bodied woman tells her family that she's suicidal, they will surely intervene with psychiatric help. But if a wheelchair-bound woman with Lou Gehrig's disease tells her family the same thing, they might assume, based on social prejudices about disabilities, that the request was a sensible one.
Medical ethicists are agonizing over the case of Daniel James, a British man who last month killed himself at a Swiss clinic that offers assisted suicide.
The case is unsettling for two reasons. First, James was not suffering a terminal disease. Second, he was 23. The popular image of people who avail themselves of assisted suicide is of very ill senior citizens at the end of life. That was not James.
James was a gregarious, burly athlete who last year suffered a terrible injury during a rugby game and was paralysed from the chest down. Although he could breathe without a ventilator, he couldn't move his limbs. After the accident he tried to kill himself several times, but was unable to do so. Finally, his parents took him to the clinic in Switzerland. They were with him in the room when the overdose was administered.
By all accounts, Daniel's parents are decent people who were motivated by love. In a statement, his mother talked about how her son had finally been freed from the "prison" he felt his body had become. "What right does any human being have to tell any other that they have to live such a life, filled with terror, discomfort and indignity?" she wrote.
I'm no expert on the psychology of bereavement, but I suspect that most anyone who suffers a loss of this enormity -- be it the loss of physical independence, the loss of a child, indeed the loss of your future as you envisioned it -- would question the value of living. But experience shows that with time and support, people -- at least some people -- find a way to endure and rebuild.
There is a cultural assumption that severe disability is worse than death, and so to Daniel's parents it was completely normal that their 23-year-old son wanted to die. Perhaps they were right. Maybe for Daniel, disability really would have been worse than death.
But he should have been given a chance to discover otherwise
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