Physician-Assisted Suicide

Last week, Stephen Hawking told BBC that he favored physician-assisted suicide for those who are terminally ill.  The idea is that if a patient is in such terrible pain with no hope of relief, they should have the right to end their own lives.

I respect Stephen Hawking greatly.  A Brief History of Time is an incredible book, one I intend to read again, and the other scientific ideas I’ve heard come from him have been illuminating.  Considering his own medical history (it’s been 50 years since he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease) I figure he’s more than earned his right to speak on this subject, however he decides to see it.

Still, this opens a can of worms and is a subject that I’d purposely forgotten about years ago.  Suicide is an unpleasant subject and open to a lot of moral questioning.  John Locke said that man has natural rights to “life, liberty, and property.”  I agree with him completely on the right to life.  Sure, we all die eventually, but while we have our bodies fully functioning, I believe that we have a right to expect that no one will infringe that natural right.  It’s why we view murder with such abhorrence; our existence is a treasure inherently ours that nobody is allowed to rob us of.

So we know why we can’t murder.  The question is: Does our right to life also include a right to end our own?  If so, then yes, physician-assisted suicide should be permitted.  There would have to be any safeguards put in place to ensure that a person has not been coerced or misunderstood, and allowed to change their minds when being assisted in pursuing their own deaths.  But if our right to life does not include a right to end our own, then suicide is murder and we should be working to prevent it at all costs.

I haven’t totally made up my mind on the moral philosophy on whether suicide is murder, although I tend to come out strongly in favor of pursuing life first and foremost.  I am troubled, though, by the organization of such groups as Compassion & Choices, whose primary goal is ensuring that every state supports our constitutional right to die.  Go to their website, www.compassionandchoices.org, and when you go see what they’re about, the first sentence says, “Compassion & Choices is the leading nonprofit organization committed to helping everyone have the best death possible.”  With unflinching honesty about their goals, I have to wonder how they organization grows.  After all, their target audience must continually drop off and they won’t be able to tell their friends if they were satisfied with the results.  Death kind of kills the message along with the messenger.

No matter how pretty the website or fanciful the message, it concerns me that we have these groups whose main purpose is hastening the sick to their death rather than seeing if it isn’t worth it to hold on just a little longer.  After all, you never know what impact you can still have on the world if you can hold on to life a little longer.