Is there a right to die?

I have written before on the right to die.  Our neighbors to the North have taken the lead in both the availability of this option as well as its exercise.  It is not an example we ought to follow.  I read a month ago or so in the New York Times Magazine a very long article giving particular focus to this issue.  In the title is the challenge:  Do patients without a terminal illness have a right to die?  It would take far more space than I have here or time to give fair treatment to the many cases of nonterminally ill people being helped to death by physicians in Canada.  You may call it doctors killing their patients intentionally.  That said, it is something we need to keep in our conversation because there are voices here who think that we should make it all uniformly legal (as some states have moved toward).

The stories cry out for an answer -- chronic depression, chronic pain, histories of abuse, failed attempts at suicide in the past, loneliness, poverty, the loss of family and friends.  Why, it would seem that individuals whose lives are already spiraling toward death are owed a painless, easy, and cost free way to end their suffering!  Do they?  Is there a threshold of pain, suffering, and hardship in which death is not only the end of what hurts but a positive step toward peace?  The world cries out for moral leadership in an age unwilling to spend the time necessary to give such hard questions their due.  The churches who proclaim the resurrection without fear should also without fear proclaim that death is not our choice.

Quoting from the NY Times Magazine:

Fundamentally, he [the death doctor] didn’t think the best way to protect poor and marginalized patients was to force them to stay alive, because in some counterfactual version of events, in which the world was a better and more just place, they might have chosen differently. That wasn’t how anything in medicine worked; a doctor always treated the patient as she was. How could it be otherwise? If only those who were rich or well connected were recognized to have autonomy and allowed to choose? . . .

He had read the report from Paula’s neurologist, which said that Paula did not have permanent brain damage and was not eligible for MAID. But he thought the specialist, who was not a MAID provider herself, misunderstood the eligibility criteria. There was nothing in the law that said that Paula’s neurological condition had to be tied to actual, physical damage to the brain. Paula’s pain was real either way. She felt it the same either way.

Doctors, who once were bound by the pledge to do no harm, have repeatedly pushed euthanasia upon those without terminal illness in Canada for years.  Teams of physicians routinely counsel those with such pain or illness to positively consider assisted suicide or, to put it more accurately, euthanasia.  Death is, according to them, a more compassionate choice than life.  It has become the mark of our compassion not to serve the suffering but to end their suffering with euthanasia or assisted suicide and to become the advocate of such death even for those without terminal illness.  This is not medicine.  Finding a doctor willing to kill you is not finding a friend.

Ill and disabled Canadians with non-life-threatening but serious conditions often do not receive nor are they promised prompt medical treatment with some waiting months or even years for such help.  At the same time, however, some of Canada's disabled and non-terminally-ill patients are found not only eligible for euthanasia but fast-tracked toward such a death.  In an amazing statement of efficiency, such a death  can happen within 90 days of the patient being found qualified.  Those patients who can find a doctor to certify that their deaths are “reasonably foreseeable,” face no waiting time once that eligibility has been established.  Is this what we want to learn from looking to our neighbor to the North -- how to be more efficient in killing the patient than in treating them?

Delaware is close to enacting such laws to allow this.  So is the UK.  Sadly, churches find opposition to their anti-death stance even from folks in their pews.  We are so conditioned to think that suffering is the worst thing of all and anything which can end suffering is good that we no longer think through the consequences of allowing physician assisted suicide or euthanasia.  How odd it is that we seem to face hurdle after hurdle to end the lives of those who have been given a death sentence for the horrid nature of their crimes but we can throw together a death cocktail at a moment's notice!  Is this truly the mark of an enlightened civilization or is it the mark of its decline?  

Some would insist that right-to-lifers are trying to make choices for the people but the reality is that we are trying to slow things down lest those who believe someone's life is not worth living are given a short cut to ending that life.  I have great respect for physicians but I do not believe that this belongs to any doctor to make the judgment call to bring an end to a life.  Surely there are circumstances when nothing more can be done except palliative care and awaiting the will of God but these are not justifications to put a figurative gun in the hands of those whose job is to help and not to hurt, to preserve life and not to end it.  If we cannot get it right on basic issues of life and death, we are in a sorry state and it just might be that the churches have failed in their role as teachers and advocates for the cause of life -- the life given and redeemed by our merciful Lord.