Euthanasia: The Dark Side Of Compassion

Last year, Oregon’s electorate leaped into ethical terrain previously reserved for prelates and priests. The voters agreed to let doctors prescribe lethal quantities of drugs for people who have a death wish and a medical prognosis of less than six months to live.

The law, which U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan overturned this month, exposes the limits of empathy. It appeals to the common yearning to ease suffering, whether the victims are 2-year-olds with scraped knees or 85-year-old mothers with wasting cancers.

But the law also promotes an unusual cure. Normally, we treat pain by healing, not killing. Which raises the question: Whose pain do we cure with assisted suicide - the victims or our own?

Herbert Hendin nailed the central issue when he wrote in this May’s Hastings Center Report: “The appeal of assisted suicide and euthanasia is a symptom of our failure to develop a better response to death and the fear of intolerable pain or artificial prolongation of life.”

As medical science has advanced, Americans have become more squeamish about facing mortality. Once upon a time, people died at home, and families knew how to accept death. But today, many folks shuffle off this mortal coil while hooked up to a macabre battery of bottles and machines.

Euthanasia advocates argue that we can avoid such techno-indignity by letting sick people choose the time and manner of their demise. Lawyers for the state of Oregon promoted this view when they told Hogan that the “death with dignity” statute could prevent “unnecessary” pain and suffering, avoid botched suicide attempts and spare families undue financial hardship.

Note one thing: None of these justifications adopts the patient’s point of view.

Peter Singer described the philosophical consequences of this new thanatology in a recent USA Today column: “We are going through a period of transition in our attitude toward the sanctity of human life.” He then urged accepting “the concept of quality of life, rather than sanctity of life, as the basis for decision-making (in cases of assisted suicide).”

Under this view, Americans should stop treating life as an inalienable right and view it, instead, as a commodity that people could discard as casually as a battered sofa. Such thinking makes survival contingent upon broader social goals - convenience, aesthetics, the need to free up a hospital bed. As a result, the quest for dignity leads ineluctably to eugenics.

The Hemlock Society, which pioneered the right-to-die movement in the United States, recently debated the idea of promoting suicide as a “choice” not just for the dying but for everybody. (What next? A fund-raiser on the Golden Gate Bridge?)

Meanwhile, physicians in the Netherlands have mapped out the back alleys of euthanasia. The project got under way in the ‘70s when doctors began answering patients’ calls for deliverance. In time, healers also considered requests from family members who no longer could endure their loved ones’ pain.

Columnist Michael Fumento reports that, by 1990, doctors were causing one in every 11 deaths in the Netherlands. Authorities classified half the procedures as “active involuntary euthanasia”; in other words, patients, like characters in a Monty Python movie, were being sent packing whether they wanted to go or not. Not surprisingly, nearly 50 percent of all Dutch nursing-home residents fear being snuffed out without prior consent.

A Dutch television crew discovered this dark side of compassion when it decided to look at a “typical” case of assisted suicide. The fellow’s wife was so eager to send him packing that she wouldn’t even let him answer the doctor’s question: Do you want to die? He merely shook and cried while she pronounced sentence.

The woman’s manner was reminiscent of an old Hemlock Society card intended for terminally ill suicide candidates. It declared: “I hear you’re going to be leaving us soon.”

The assisted-suicide movement inevitably produces self-indulgence and degradation. One can envision demands for “death care” so families could ease the burden of saying goodbye. Give dad a peck and a squeeze as the family heads for Disney World and the Dignity Facilitator ushers the codger onto the Kevorkian Express.

There are no easy ways to deal with death. But if we want to show we care, we can do better than to burst through the door with a fistful of pills and a fifth of gin.

Better to share our time, love and tears - and leave life-and-death power in the hands of the only Authority who won’t abuse it.

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