REPORTEDLY, TWO Colorado legislators are drafting a physician-assisted suicide bill for debate and, they hope, passage in the upcoming session of the Colorado legislature.
Physician-assisted suicide is not a slippery slope. Its the bottom of the slope. Once the absolute, thou shalt not murder, is compromised, the fundamental line has already been crossed.
The implications, the so-called slippery slope, are not for the future. They are here.
In fact, they are here with or without a formal law approving physician-assisted suicide. Mere discussion of such an idea, not to mention its legalization in six states, has made it a reality.
Unless you and everyone in your family have been perfectly healthy for the past 40 years, not once having stepped into a hospital for any reason during that long time, you may already know that assisted suicide, not to mention outright murder, is a daily occurrence in one or another hospital around the country.
Its just called by different names.
Its intentionally withholding medicine, or giving too much medicine, or putting the patient in the wrong department, the wrong hospital or under the care of the wrong specialist, with or without the input of the patient or the family.
To be sure, end-of-life issues have become far more complex due to longer lives and better technology, but with all due allowance for this complexity, the bottom line is that old people with serious medical issues have become an inconvenience.
Perhaps, or so at least I hope, there remain many parts of the country where the basic ethic of medicine to heal is still firmly in place.
But as a universal ethic, it is of the past.
The idea that it takes a law to enable a drastically suffering person to end his life is to ignore all the winks, the oh so easily justifiable, and hideable, actions that once were unthinkable, but no more.
IF SO, why oppose a law that formalizes physician assisted suicide?
First, its one more permit, and a loud one, that would accelerate the end of the very idea it supposedly supports: patient autonomy. The pressure is already on the very ill patient, especially the very old one, to surrender his autonomy, to ask not to be treated.
Second, such a law undermines trust in the physician. Is he or she a healer, a killer, or what? At least officially, we do not now ask these questions. A law authorizing physicians to assist in murder would change that.
Third, soon enough the role of the physician would be dispensed with. If it is OK to kill oneself, why the need for a physician at all? Soon enough, the patient directly, or the patients family or friends would, under one legal provision or another, assume the right to administer the fatal dose. Talk about potential conflicts of interest! Here are examples, as laid out by Krista Kafer of KNUS, in the Denver Post:
. . . such a law would be abused.It is not hard to imagine a greedy relative who wishes to hasten the insurance payout, a stressed and sleepless caretaker, or a spouse who is profoundly distressed by his beloveds suffering making the wrong decision when confronted with a suicidal or even not-so-suicidal loved one.
Fourth, legalized suicide for the terminally ill would send a clear message to the deeply troubled who are not physically ill at all: Its OK to kill yourself. Talk about harm to efforts to stem youth suicide!
Fifth, the role of a physician in a physician-assisted suicide law already bespeaks an inherent contradiction. On the one hand, such a law acknowledges the physician as a unique caretaker for an absolute: life. On the other hand, it robs the physician of this absolute.
And, at bottom, this is what a physician-assisted suicide law is all about: the reinforcement of the already strong tendency in society to shift the ultimate frame of judgement from the absolute to the relative.
If life itself is subject to the wishes of the individual, expect life to be compromised for a far broader class of people than the terminally or chronically ill. The alternative to life as an absolute is convenience as an absolute.
It will be inconvenient financially to sustain a non-terminally ill patient.
It will be inconvenient emotionally to sustain a mentally ill, demented or severely disabled patient.
It will be inconvenient for a family to sustain a disabled newborn. True, the initial suicide laws will stipulate that the act must be left up to the informed decision of the patient; a disabled newborn would not qualify. Soon enough, however, the true believers in assisted suicide will find a way around that, too.
It will ultimately be inconvenient to sustain any person one doesnt want around, over whom one has acquired legal control.
Such examples define the real slippery slope signified by a physicians assisted suicide law, marking the end of the last absolute.
Each slippery slope betokens another, steeper one. And that one is this: The liberty to self-destruct will lead to the destruction of far more than the individual person. Whole classes of people will become at risk. If you think this is far-fetched, visit some hospitals in Holland. Does Colorado really want to follow?
Copyright © 2014 by the Intermountain Jewish News
