\u201cThere is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.\u201d<\/p>\n
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n On Tuesday, Massachusetts voters will be asked to wrestle with that problem and vote up or down on Question 2.\u00a0 I urge them to vote yes.<\/p>\n If Question 2 passes it will become the \u201cDeath With Dignity\u201d law, allowing for physician assisted suicide; that is, it would allow doctors to prescribe lethal \u201cmedication\u201d to patients with an incurable disease and less than six months to live.[1]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 The law would not authorize euthanasia, in which a physician actually administers the lethal drugs or mercy killings.\u00a0 Furthermore, the law would criminalize \u201ccoercing\u201d people into requesting a prescription.\u00a0 Physician assisted suicide is currently legal in Oregon, Washington state and Montana.\u00a0 On the other hand the right to refuse life saving treatment is nearly absolute in the United States.<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, and thankfully, the measure has provoked impassioned argument on both sides.\u00a0 That argument caused me to reexamine my libertarian instinct to vote yes (hypothetically since I am a New Jersey resident) but failed to sway my conviction. \u00a0Among the arguments on the \u201cVote No\u201d side is what many consider to be the insufficiency of the safeguards built into the law.\u00a0 For example, many criticize the fact that the law does not require patients to be evaluated by a psychiatrist before requesting lethal medications. \u00a0The law would however require a psychiatrist to evaluate the patient if the physician believed the patient was suffering from a mental disorder affecting her judgment. \u00a0I, however, would not require psychiatric evaluations of patients with no other symptoms of mental-illness.\u00a0 To do so, to me, implies that one is treating the desire to end one\u2019s life itself as a sign of such illness.\u00a0 While this question hinges on a philosophical debate on the nature of mental illness which I am not qualified to fully hash out; it strikes me as absurd, and demeaning, to treat a desire to die, especially in the circumstances in which this law would apply, as a sign of mental illness.<\/p>\n In a recent New York Times Op-Ed[2]<\/a> bioethicist Ezekiel Emmanuel argues convincingly that the majority of physician-assisted suicides are not people in extraordinary physical pain but people overwhelmed with fear, depression, and hopelessness.\u00a0 He writes, \u201c[i]n this light, physical assisted suicide looks less like a good death in the face of unremitting pain and more like plain old suicide.\u201d\u00a0 While this is rhetorically powerful, it begs the question: what\u2019s wrong with allowing doctors to help patients commit suicide in some well defined situations.[3]<\/a>\u00a0 I say nothing.\u00a0 Ezekiel continues, \u201cour response to suicidal feelings associated with depression and hopelessness is not to give people the means to end their lives but to offer them counseling and caring.\u201d\u00a0 Nobody is arguing that those seeking to end their lives should be denied counseling and caring; rather that in certain circumstances it is permissible to also allow them to commit suicide.<\/p>\n Similarly, Ira Byock, writing in the Atlantic<\/em>,[4]<\/a> opposes physician assisted suicide in large part because it does not fit into what he says should be the progressive agenda to improve end of life care.\u00a0 While I agree with all of his proposals for doing just that, it does not follow that physician-assisted suicide should be left out.\u00a0 Like Emmanuel, Byock seems to assume that suicide could only be the desperate surrender of a patient and that legalizing it could only be the desperate surrender of progressives in the face of a system that struggles to care for those close to death.\u00a0 Rather, I firmly believe that suicide should be available for patients no matter how good or bad end of life care is, the right to sufficient end of life care and the right to suicide may matter at the same time, but they are complements not replacements.\u00a0 Also, I, apparently unlike Byock have faith in progressives that they will not treat this as some sort of sufficient band-aid for end of life care and move on to other social ills to fix.<\/p>\n Furthermore, Byock concedes that \u201cas Jean Paul Sartre reminded us, suicide is always an option.\u201d\u00a0 However, for Sartre Suicide was more than an option.\u00a0 \u201cJean-Paul Sartre was likewise struck by the possibility of suicide as an assertion of authentic human will in the face of absurdity. Suicide is, according to Sartre, an opportunity to stake out our understanding of our essence as individuals in a godless world. For the existentialists, suicide was not a choice shaped mainly by moral considerations but by concerns about the individual as the sole source of meaning in a meaningless universe.\u201d[5]<\/a>\u00a0 Doesn\u2019t that sound like something progressives should fight for?\u00a0 Suicide is thus the expression of an individual will, a will that neither Byock, nor the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, should attempt to coerce into a different expression of itself.\u00a0 For that is what voting no on Question 2 would do.\u00a0 Byock says that suicide is always an option.\u00a0 However, for many of the people who would be eligible for physician-assisted suicide should Question 2 become law, that is only true in the most formalistic sense.\u00a0 For many, suicide without the help of a doctor to make to make it more likely to succeed with as little pain as possible,[6]<\/a> would be far too difficult to be a viable option.<\/p>\n Finally, Byock\u2019s statement that \u201cProgressives in Massachusetts who vote for Question 2 should remember that by the end of Orwell’s\u00a01984<\/em>\u00a0the protagonist, Winston Smith, loved Big Brother,\u201d confuses me.\u00a0 It may be that he is saying we who vote for it have fallen pray to the \u201cNewspeak\u201d of its advocates.[7]<\/a>\u00a0 It may be that he is saying that while it may be Big Brother-ish to prohibit suicide we will be thankful for it in the end. I simply disagree with the first possible meaning, because I have faith in voters to think through what they are doing.\u00a0 As for the second, even if that is true, we cannot accept even a Big Brother that we do come to love.<\/p>\n The most compelling, fear of those fighting against the law is that this will open the door for abuse of a vulnerable population.\u00a0 They imagine relatives (or, even more insidiously, insurance companies) pressuring the sick and elderly into \u201cchoosing\u201d suicide in order to spare costs.\u00a0 While this is certainly troubling and certainly a place in which regulation would be necessary, it seems to me that this would only rarely be the case.\u00a0 Ezekiel\u2019s article cites the lack of mass appeal of physician assisted suicide as a reason not to vote for Question 2.\u00a0 The lack of occurrences of physician assisted suicide however, makes me far more comfortable with legalizing it.\u00a0\u00a0 The fact that Oregon and the Netherlands have had very few cases of physician assisted suicide seems to me to prove that incidents of suicide are unlikely to be the result of a whim or undue pressure from economically interested parties.\u00a0\u00a0 More basically, I do not think that the government\u2019s stripping people of choice is the proper way to protect them from undue influence or the trauma of having to make a hard choice.\u00a0 \u00a0The question of suicide is personal, nuanced, difficult and fraught with emotions, philosophies, and faith.\u00a0 It is not a question the government has any business answering for an individual.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> For a much more detailed examination of what the law is see Attorney General Coakley\u2019s summary here:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [2]<\/a> \u201cFour Myths About Doctor-Assisted Suicide,\u201d Ezekiel Emmanuel, The New York Times Online, Opinionator.\u00a0 <\/em>Oct. 27, 2012.\u00a0 http:\/\/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com\/2012\/10\/27\/four-myths-about-doctor-assisted-suicide\/?hp.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [3]<\/a> Another interesting twist to the law is that the death certificate would show the disease the patient has been diagnosed with as the cause of death, not suicide.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n