I’ll be off in about two hours to debate assisted suicide at the Scottish Parliament. I am going to alter my usual approach—or better stated, to alter my usual emphasis—to more forcefully reflect the harmful message assisted suicide advocacy sends to potential “consumers” of hastened death.
Rather than being about freedom and assurance, as supporters claim, I believe assisted suicide is ultimately about rejection, exclusion, and abandonment, even if that is not what supporters intend. Indeed, when a society establishes different categories—some who will be given suicide prevention, and others facilitation—it sends a clarion message about the way it views those put into these different categories. I remember my hospice patient and good friend Bob Salamanca, who died of ALS. He told me that whenever he heard advocates for assisted suicide use ALS as the justification for legalization, his blood would boil. “They’re trying to push me off of the brightly lit boulevard and into the dark alleys,” he told me. He was so hurt by the rejection it was hard for him to articulate.
I also plan to point out that the “slippery slope,” as it is sometimes called is very real. Indeed, here in the UK it is slip-sliding away before the thing is even legalized. Whereas we once heard that assisted suicide should be limited to the terminally ill, already on this side of The Pond, two other categories have been added—the seriously disabled and those with degenerating conditions. We see that in the quasi decriminalization of assisted suicide by family members by the head prosecutor of England and Wales, and in the last assisted suicide proposal here in Scotland, that had “limited” the eligible to those categories—and perhaps more. From a story about the upcoming proposal earlier this year:
People with a progressive and irreversible illness, the terminally ill, or those who had an “intolerable” quality of life, could get a doctor’s help to kill themselves under the proposed law.
When you think about it, anyone who wants to commit suicide believes they have an “intolerable life.” So, this would appear to be a bill that would have no real limitations—just as I have been warning about lo these many years.
The issue of assisted suicide is greater than the sum of its parts. How we decide this issue will tell us a lot about our humanity and the value we place on the lives of all people, not just those whose lives are robust and satisfying.
