I Don't Want To Die Alone!
By Jim Peron
"I don't want to die alone!" were the stinging words of 69 year old Nancy Crick of Australia. Terminally ill, in constant pain, consistently nauseous and suffering diarrhoea Nancy Crick had decided that any meaningful life was over for her. She simply wanted to die.
But in Australia "assisted suicide" is illegal though suicide itself is not. But the law is such that merely being present during a suicide is seen as assistance and could carry a penalty of life in prison.
In spite of this 21 friends and relatives stayed by Crick's side as she took the drugs that would end her suffering. She video taped a statement saying: "It's my death. I'm doing it and no one else." She told the press "The thing that upsets me most is that the law says I can kill myself any time I want to, but no one can be with me because they just might have helped me. That's just rubbish, and I don't see why I should die along. I don't want to die alone."
Opponents of assisted suicide argue that human life is sacred and must be preserved. But it is the unique sacredness of human life which they, in fact, deny. For these people life is merely the state of not being dead. It has nothing to do with all those characteristics of being human that separates us from a plant.
A plant is either dead or alive. But for people life is not merely an on/off switch. Life is the ability to choose, it is the ability to enjoy existence, it is the ability to function and grow. For Nancy Crick life had ceased long before she swallowed some pills.
So-called "right to life" groups refuse to acknowledge Nancy Crick's humanity. For them she is the same as a plant. She is either alive or dead and that is all that matters. But Nancy Crick was a rational being with the ability to choose and determine for herself. She wasn't a plant without any ability to think. She was a rights-bearing entity unlike trees or weeds.
To respect life requires that we respect the choices of the person living that life. The right-to-life people don't do that. They are not advocates of right to life but merely opponents of death. And a right to something, to have any meaning, requires the right to deny it as well. My right to life means I can choose not to live when that choice becomes necessary. To call the denial of choice a "right" is absurd. You don't grant a right by taking it away.
The fact is that most of the people demanding that Nancy Crick continue to suffer do so out of a religious conviction. They accept the idea that human beings have no rights except to obey the dictates of a supreme being whose will they just happen to be able to discern. For them human beings are the property of some deity or another. God's will just happens to coincide with their own opinions.
Modern secular nations were founded liberal principles which, while respecting the rights of individuals to be religious, did not use the law to either promote or impede religious values. As such it is not a proper function of government to prevent individuals from ending their own lives when they see fit nor to prevent others from assisting them when requested. Opponents of choice argue that such assistance is murder. But all death is not murder just as all sex is not rape. The critical factor is consent. Without it death would be murder and sex would be rape. With consent neither is a violation of rights and thus not a proper object of criminal law.
The Western liberal tradition argues that proper government is a compact between the people and the state. What powers government has are those which the people themselves give it. And the people can not grant the government a power which they, themselves, do not possess. If we as individuals do not have the right to interfere with the lives, and sometimes voluntary deaths, of others then we can not give that power to the State. If as Thomas Jefferson said, government is founded to protect our rights then how does the state affirm our rights by taking them away from us? Laws forbidding the right to die are basically religious in nature and hence illegitimate.
The refusal to grant individuals the right to end their own life is not a slippery slope leading to genocide anymore than granting individuals control over their own sex life necessarily leads to rape. Instead it is the acknowledgement that human life is fundamentally different from any other living entity. We humans can make the choose of whether we want to live or not. That choice does not deny life but affirms it in the most fundamental way.
Jim Peron is the Executive Director of the Institute for Liberal Values, the editor of the book The Liberal Tide, and the author of the forthcoming book 'The Road Not Taken: Resolving the Crisis on the Roads.'
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Institute for Liberal Values, Thursday September 9th 2010. |
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