Suicide vs. murder — VOICES for REASON

With Congress on the verge of expanding government control over health care, heated discussion has arisen about whether Obama’s reforms will result in old people being killed. It is, of course, important to carefully consider the implications of health-care rationing under socialized medicine. But there’s a completely distinct issue that’s being dragged into this debate, an issue that must be kept separate from the overblown rhetorical exchanges concerning “death panels.”

That issue is physician-assisted suicide.

At stake are the survival and spread of the kind of pioneering legislation by which Oregon and Washington have legalized physician-assisted suicide.

Unfortunately, what’s happening today is that people are confusing the difference between suicide and murder, by including both acts under such imprecise terms as “euthanasia” and “end of life choices.” For example, two House Republicans said recently that a law requiring end-of-life counseling “could create a slippery slope for a more permissive environment for euthanasia, mercy-killing and physician-assisted suicide.” But what’s really slippery here is the idea that suicide and murder should both be illegal, and only in an improperly “permissive environment” could physicians lawfully assist in a terminally ill patient’s suicide.

Suicide and murder are radically different acts. The essence of suicide is an individual’s decision to kill himself, with or without a physician’s assistance. The essence of murder is one person’s decision to kill another, without legal justification such as self-defense. One has a moral right to commit suicide; one does not have a moral right to commit murder.

The right to commit suicide is encompassed by the right to life. As I have written elsewhere, a healthy individual typically wants to live in order to pursue his own happiness:

But what if happiness becomes impossible to attain? What if a dread disease, or some other calamity, drains all joy from life, leaving only misery and suffering? The right to life includes and implies the right to commit suicide. To hold otherwise—to declare that society must give you permission to kill yourself—is to contradict the right to life at its root. If you have a duty to go on living, despite your better judgment, then your life does not belong to you, and you exist by permission, not by right.

Because government’s duty is to protect individual rights, all other states in the Union should emulate Oregon and Washington by legalizing physician-assisted suicide. Such laws are important because they provide objective procedures by which a person desiring to end his life can leave behind proof that death was his free choice. (In the absence of such laws, some have resorted to so-called suicide rings, groups of individuals who secretly and furtively provide the assistance, at the risk of prosecution, that terminally ill patients should have freedom to invite and accept openly.)

Loose terminology confuses public discussion, by blurring the crucial distinction between suicide and murder. For example, the dictionary defines “euthanasia” as “the act or practice of killing or permitting the death of hopelessly sick or injured individuals (as persons or domestic animals) in a relatively painless way for reasons of mercy.” Under that definition, euthanasia includes both murder (“killing” an individual) and suicide (“permitting the death” of an individual). So if people understand the choice as whether or not to legalize “euthanasia,” then every reasonable person will oppose it, to avoid legalizing murder. But now it’s more difficult for that same reasonable person to uphold the propriety of physician-assisted suicide, since “euthanasia” condemns it to the same despicable category as murder.

The Obama administration’s campaign to expand controls over medical care should not be allowed to confuse or retard the (too slow) progress being made toward legalizing physician-assisted suicide in this country.

Image: Wikimedia Commons