Euthanasia

It is true that everyone dies eventually, but if we use that as our argument we can easily use it to justify other actions. It could rationalize dowry deaths in India, genocide, infant abandonment and countless other barbaric practices. Yes, everyone dies. That does not give us the right to dictate when that happens. Saying we should make euthanasia legal because people would do it anyway is a little like saying we should make drugs legal. People do them anyway. Legalizing drugs would give people a legal and possibly healthier way to do what they want, but the end is the same. Legal or not, euthanasia kills people. Euthanasia is illegal because murder is illegal. I am not comparing people who help a family member seeking physician-assisted-suicide to murderers, but the end result is the same: an innocent person loses his life. The family might feel guilt, but the act is the deliberate killing of someone you love, so guilt might be a natural response. Either way, counseling should certainly be available. It is possible that having a doctor kill your loved one could alleviate the guilt you might feel. I personally would still think about the fact that I consented to and facilitated their death. Technically, the person would be killing himself, taking barbiturates. In that sense, the doctor is not doing anything, but both the doctor and I would have facilitated my loved one’s death. Euthanasia is the taking of a person’s life and should not be legal. No one ever said that every moment of life is good. That wouldn’t be rational. But the life in itself is good. We should respect people, absolutely, but we need to do that by actually respecting who they are and not wanting to end their time on earth. Real compassion will love people no matter their condition and encourage them that they are loved and precious, regardless of the pain or condition they are in. Suffering at the end does not change the good of a person’s whole life. We all suffer sometimes, albeit some far more than others. That suffering does not make us less than we are. If anything, it provides the best opportunities to grow. We can’t live pain-free lives. Suffering is a part of life and one that we have to face. There is the metaphor of the cheese. This view reduces the view of the person to the value of an object. If part of someone’s life is unpleasant we should cut it away. We don’t get to cherry-pick the nice moments in life. Life is life, sometimes good and sometimes bad, but always valuable and to be respected. We should never make people suffer, but we should not kill them either. There are other options. There are choices between the two extremes of physician-assisted suicide and a forced prolonging of painful life. Medicine is meant to heal, and death is not healing. It is true that death will alleviate physical suffering, but the person won’t be alive to appreciate that. In ending their suffering, you end everything else about them. The state has a duty to protect the best interest of the people. Death is never a better scenario than life. Life can be painful and ugly, and sometimes we hate it, but that does not make it bad and it does not make death a better option. If we support euthanasia it is a little like supporting teen suicide. If you’re in a lot of pain and you don’t see a point to living, why not end it? The State arguably has no right to prevent your death, but we don’t often hear people supporting that teenagers go and kill themselves if they feel like it. That is because all problems are temporary (even, in a sense, terminal illnesses) and human life is more valuable than anything else in the world. Our illnesses don’t define us. Even dying and in pain, you are not your suffering. You are a unique human being with dignity that cannot be diminished or taken away. This dignity can, however, be violated. Killing a person violates his dignity. Some people argue that we have no right to force someone to live. The reality is that we have no right to take his life. Economically, it does make sense that ending a sick person’s life saves money. The problem with this money-saving mentality is that we are no longer looking at people as human beings. We start to see them as numbers, costs and liabilities. The overall mentality becomes one of practicality. If the person does not perform a function or directly benefit society, we should get rid of him. As a classic example, getting rid of the sick and elderly was one of the first moves of the Nazi party at the beginning of the Shoah. It can be easy enough for a culture to slip into a mentality of use. This sounds extreme, but is it? When terminal illness is a declaration of a person’s diminished value, logically he would receive second-rate health care, if any. Under this mentality, people are objects, not rational and inherently valuable beings. We can’t see people this way. The idea that people are measured by what they produce is what leads to eugenic policies that seek to eliminate the weak and less-than-perfect. Granted, most individuals and families who want euthanasia are not thinking, “Great, I can get rid of my useless relative and save money.” Most people have good intentions. Unfortunately, a utilitarian outlook is the natural consequence of a mindset based on euthanasia, one that estimates a person’s worth and his quality of life based on accidents of his life, not based on his nature. On the opposite side of the argument, providing treatment can advance medicine, create more jobs, and preserve the greatest resource we have: people. But what about people who are suffering or don’t want to degenerate? It’s a tragedy that people think ending their life is better than living it. Pain does not make us any less human. Often the most inspiring people are ones who overcome the worst suffering (Douglas Mawson, Helen Keller and countless others). People should not have to die to be happy. We all want to be loved. We want to die in the company of people who care about us, happy and with dignity. The people who love us want what is best for us, but death is not better than life. As far as autonomy, death is a decision that we appear to have control over. The reality is that there is a lot in life we have no control over. We don’t choose when we are born or what we look like, what kind of economic standing we are born into or who are family are. We often don’t control when we might lose a job or lose a family member. Death is a decision that most people never make. In a sense, the corresponding event to life (or birth) is death. We don’t choose it, but we make the most of it. Real autonomy is making the choices we can make and exercising our free will. Autonomy does not extend to decisions that we don’t have control over. We can’t and don’t give people everything they want. It is not our duty to give people everything they want. Medical professionals don’t let patients decide everything about their treatment. Most people are not trained in medicine. There are some decisions they cannot make. Not making euthanasia legal does not take away a choice a person had, it simply prevents him from making a choice he never had to begin with. Medical professionals should not let people choose when they die, just as they would not let a patient diagnose himself or prescribe his own treatment. Medicine is not meant to give people what they want. Like setting a broken leg, sometimes treatment is painful. You wouldn’t tell a child, “This is going to hurt for a long time. If you’re not okay with the pain, you can choose whether you want treatment or you want to end the pain.” No. The doctor would tell the child that the treatment is for his own well being and heal him to the best of his abilities. The same logic applies for terminal illnesses. It is not powerful to die. It takes strength to live. To put it bluntly, autonomy in death does not leave the person free and empowered. It leaves him dead.