Editor’s Note: The Connecticut legislature just killed an assisted-suicide bill in committee, without even giving our representatives a chance to vote on it. This strikes me as a misguided example of what the term “pro-life” means ... or should mean. BTW ... is it just my imagination that the word “family” in the name of any organization is conservative code for “right wing”? This article was written in response to a Letter to the Editor in several local newspapers. Pro-Lifers Kill Off Assisted Suicide
For
the zealots, pro-life means more than just being anti-choice on abortion. The
urge to control the life of everyone around them from the womb to the grave
helps explain why Connecticut House Bill 6645, which would have legalized
doctor-assisted suicide, died in the legislature’s Public Health Committee,
without even coming to a vote.
Equally
wrong is Dr. Hosinski’s assertion that, with the repeal of Connecticut’s
death penalty, assisted-suicide supporters are now trying “to inflict it
on the sick and elderly.” Nothing in the proposed legislation “inflicts”
anything on anybody. The measure drafted by state senator Ed Meyer (D.-Guilford)
required two physicians to certify, in writing and under oath, that the patient
making the request is likely to die within six months and is mentally competent
to make the decision. Three
“life issues” create controversy in American public policy: abortion,
capital punishment and assisted suicide. The first
two are problematic because they involve ending the life of someone (or
something, depending on your point of view) who hasn’t given consent. Assisted
suicide, on the other hand, is a decision that affects only the life of the
person freely making that choice. In
a free country, it’s hard to justify the state’s interest in protecting its
citizens from themselves. You’d think that conservatives, who constantly
pretend they want government out of our lives, would
also want to deny the state the authority to dictate personal decisions
concerning the duration of one’s life. Dr.
Hosinski wrote, “I never had a patient approach me to help them [sic] die.”
However, if no one wanted an earlier, less painful death, then there’d be no
demand for such legislation. Are end-of-life organizations such as Compassion
& Choices operating out of malice? Was Dr. Gary Blick, who treats HIV
patients, demonstrating an officious lack of compassion, when he expressed empathy for the
terminally ill who “do not want to go through the suffering they have to go
through”? No
one doubts the sincerity of disabled rights activists, such as Cathy Ludlum, who
opposed HB 6645. Ms. Ludlum asked that lawmakers focus more on “giving people
a good life than giving people a good death,” but the two are not mutually
exclusive.
Anyone
who’s seen someone suffer with bone cancer knows pain management is often
woefully insufficient. My favorite aunt, dying of lung cancer, stored up drugs
in case the pain became too much to bear. She never used them, but the
experience of dying patients in places where assisted suicide is legal is that
they often take comfort from the knowledge they have the power to end their own
suffering, even if they never avail themselves of that option. Why should anyone
be denied this solace and this sense of control over what is, after all, his or
her own life? Governor
Malloy cited the “societal and religious taboos” that make this issue
controversial, but no one knows god’s will on this subject — it’s never
even mentioned in the Bible — and America isn’t a theocracy yet anyway. Besides,
this proposal wouldn’t have compelled anyone to violate his or her religious
or personal beliefs. (Many of the bill’s supporters at the public hearing on the
measure were clergymen, as well as doctors and nurses.) Opponents
often call assisted suicide “playing god, ” but isn’t making people suffer
against their will more like playing god than permitting them to end their
torment on their own terms? God would seem to have already cast his vote when he
inflicted the terminal illness. Evidently,
the Family Institute feels godlike enough to advocate depriving dying patients
of the freedom to exercise what could be the last real choice they’ll ever get
to make. However, it’s un-American to deny the pursuit of happiness by taking
away our liberty to control our own lives. Should this issue come up again, I hope our representatives take a more compassionate view of what it means
to be pro-life. Click here to return to the Mark Drought home page. |