“Dying with Dignity” is the latest cause célebre of the progressive, evolutionist set, whereby we set aside centuries of ignorance and appropriate for ourselves the right to determine when and how we die when faced with a terminal disease/diagnosis.
I have a different proposition: how about we all agree that killing a human person is not the solution for our problems? Whether that person be a new one in the womb, a guilty one on death row, or an ill one with perhaps 6 months left to live (or more, who really knows).
I have real sympathy for those who face the terrible suffering of a terminal disease and understand completely the desire to avoid that suffering and spare one’s loved ones the agony of watching someone die in pain. I really do. But here are the problems with “death with dignity.”
One, the laws or proposed laws have various limitations and requirements in place, one being that the person in question has six months to live. This condition is extremely imprecise and subject to abuse. How often are people given diagnoses of whatever length which turn out to be inaccurate?
More problematic: if assisted suicide were made legal with this provision, how often would doctors intentionally shorten the term to meet this requirement, either at the insistence of the patient or due to his/her own perverted sense of mercy?
Two, the notion that dying with dignity means killing yourself before you lose control of your bodily functions necessarily means that those who choose to die naturally are somehow “undignified.” We need to see all stages of human life as possessing inherent dignity and refrain from denying someone with limited or no control of their functions their dignity.
Three, and this is the most compelling argument to me: if we allow this practice, the pressure on the sick to accept an early death will inevitably increase. In other words, if someone knows they have the option to off themselves, they will feel pressure to do so in order not to upset their family members or be a burden on them or the system. There will likely even be financial pressures on doctors and hospitals to recommend suicide in order to protect the bottom line, since those last months before death are often the most expensive.
Someone may want to stick it out, see if they can somehow recover, or at least let nature take its course, but they may choose not to because there is peer, societal, and medical pressure to just get it over with. That is a scary thought to me.
Four, the decision to commit suicide assumes that the patient is in their right mind, but how often will this requirement also be abused? People near death are often simply not in their right mind due to physiological or even psychological reasons, the fear of death being enough to scare even the most stoic of souls. And you know that if the person is not in their right mind, the next frontier will be giving others legal guardianship so they can make the decision for the person, since they will know “what they would have wanted.”
So, instead of going down this latest road of death, why don’t we all agree that any solution that involves killing a human person from conception to natural death is not one we would countenance. This will create a culture of life where all lives are assumed to possess dignity equally and are thought of as precious and worth defending, not as problems that need to be solved/eliminated.
Trey Hoffman
Peachtree City, Ga.
