Whenever the debate over euthanasia arises, I wonder whether opponents of assisted suicide have ever seen a loved one battle a terminal disease. Written descriptions fall flat in comparison to actually watching a person die in front of you -- watching as her body thins and her eyes shrink and recede. You see a face become nothing more than pronounced cheekbones and a receding hairline. It's difficult to watch; it must be almost unbearable to experience.
The reason I wonder whether critics have ever experienced such a tragic situation is that their arguments often come off as juvenile. Kevin Smith, the executive director of a New Hampshire-based conservative think tank, was recently quoted in The Dartmouth as saying, "Doctors are there to do good ... They're there to help people, not to put people to death" ("Assisted suicide bill proposed," Feb. 27). Ideally, doctors would not be responsible for ending lives, but this is not an ideal world. Indeed, terminal diseases are about as far from ideal as you can get, and it is both crude and unproductive to frame the euthanasia debate in terms of "good" and "bad" actions. The argument is far more complex than such vague and simple terms.
I've frequently heard from critics of assisted suicide that patients could still take their lives without the help of doctors. They contend that such a brutal practice does not need to be legitimized or institutionalized. But this argument seems odd to me, especially considering how much these critics profess to value human life. Having a terminally ill family member choose to end his life is a horrific situation that I hope I never have to experience. But the misery of the situation would only be compounded if that family member's attempt to end his life had to be messy -- or worse yet, was unsuccessful. To push an already hopeless person to something as shameful as overdosing on painkillers and leaving a suicide note seems to connote the ultimate disrespect for human life.
It's true that medical breakthroughs can occur seemingly overnight. A patient who was hopelessly terminal may wake up to a scientific miracle and be cured. But it's inhumane and cruel to prolong a person's agony because of the minute chance that a cure is on the horizon. Along the same lines, critics of euthanasia often cite the Hippocratic Oath -- which implicitly prohibits euthanasia -- as a reason for proscribing assisted suicide. Perhaps, however, we should reevaluate how strictly we follow a creed that was written over 2000 years ago. If assisted suicide is morally wrong, we should arrive at that conclusion on our own.
For me, the most offensive criticism of assisted suicide is the argument that says euthanasia devalues human life. What bothers me about this claim is that it's laden with misguided value judgments. It suggests that those who choose to die are cowardly -- that they're taking the easy way out and demeaning the value of their own lives in the process. It's easy to offer platitudes about the theoretical value of life. It's far more difficult to be so self-righteous when one is sitting in a hospice bed, having endured months of unbearable pain. If anything, those who choose to die affirm the value of their lives by demanding that these lives mean more than just a breathing tube and a morphine-induced stupor. Terminal patients who choose to die want to be remembered as something more than a semi-conscious skeleton.
Death is tragic, traumatic and uncomfortable to talk about, and it becomes even more difficult to address when we feel that a person is choosing to end his life prematurely. Still, to say that euthanasia demeans a person is just inaccurate. Those patients who choose to take their lives refuse to buy "honor" at the price of physical destruction and emotional trauma; nothing could be a more positive affirmation of life's value. Assisted suicide is fortunately something that most of us will never have to consider. Still, we should hesitate to offer moral judgments about people whose situations are unfathomable, and above all, we should avoid reducing the discussion to nave conceptions of "good" and "bad."
