Last Monday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the End of Life Option Act, which allows physicians to prescribe lethal prescriptions to terminally ill patients, to be taken at a time and place of the patients’ choosing. California joins Washington, Oregon, California and Vermont as states where physician assisted suicide (PAS) is legal. In order to qualify, patients must be legal adults, be judged to be mentally competent and be expected to die of a terminal illness within six months.
Advocates assert that terminally ill patients should have the right to end their life on their own terms if they so choose. To this point: the Supreme Court has twice ruled that there exists no constitutional right to PAS, although states may legalize it. Dying isn’t a right inasmuch as it is a biological obligation, albeit one that can be hastened, but one in which there exists no right to legally enlist outside aid.
But while assisted suicide still may sound more compassionate, the logical argument behind it has dangerous societal implications. For example, many proponents of assisted suicide have criticized the bill claiming that the right to die should extend beyond those just immediately terminally ill.
And this is why the moral arguments for PAS, in addition to betraying human dignity, will ultimately prove to be inconsistent and uneven ground on which to craft coherent public policy, the failure of which results in abuse of the law that disproportionately harms the weak and vulnerable in our society. Which is why the American Medical Association and dozens of disability rights groups oppose physician assisted suicide, recognizing the potential and realized ramifications of making it a normative practice.
Because if indeed the legal ability to choose to prematurely end one’s own life is a demand of human freedom, then even the current law proves to be unduly narrow to accomplish its intended goals, and qualification restrictors such as the requirement of the presence of any terminal illness at all becomes at the least an arbitrary requirement and at the most a restrictive one. Likewise, as the Heritage Foundation notes, if “compassion demands that some patients be helped to kill themselves, it makes little sense to claim that only those who are capable of self-administering the deadly drugs be given this option.” The New York State Task Force on Life and the Law (established by democrat Mario Cuomo) echoes these concerns, saying, “even if the more narrow category of terminal illness is chosen at the outset, the line is unlikely to hold for the very reason that it has not been selected by advocates of assisted suicide – the logic of suicide as a compassionate choice for patients who are in pain or suffering suggests no such limit.” Assisted suicide in other countries provides evidence for the inevitability of this slippery slope.
Additionally, states that have legalized it have failed to establish sufficient safeguards to protect against abuse of the mentally ill, poor and elderly.
For example, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Depression and hopelessness, rather than pain, seem to be the primary factors motivating patients’ interest in euthanasia or PAS.” And according to a study published by the NCBI, the risk to request euthanasia for patients with depression was 4.1 times higher than that of patients without depression. Yet only 5 of the 178 patients who died of assisted suicide in Oregon in 2013 and 2014 were referred for any psychiatric or psychological evaluation.” Furthermore, PAS advocacy groups like “Compassion & Choices” have been known to keep a list of “friendly” doctors sympathetic to the cause, willing to help mentally ill patients “doctor shop” to receive favorable diagnoses. This represents a drastic failure of people suffering from a mental illness, who statistically with treatment would likely change their minds.
PAS also changes the way we think about the poor and elderly, and the way they think of themselves. The relative cost of lethal drugs is significantly lower than the cost of months of treatment or hospice care. Health insurance providers have been known to deny coverage for treatments like chemotherapy, while listing lethal drugs as covered alternatives. This, for many low income and or elderly patients, shifts an accelerated death from being just an option to an obligation to avoid burdening their families.
But physician assisted suicide’s most egregious offense is its affront on the dignity of human life. By telling the weak and vulnerable that it will cost them less to die than to allow them to live, it judges some lives to be more worthy of protection than others. Instead of seeking to end life as a solution to suffering, we should respond with appropriate medical and palliative care designed to uphold the inherent dignity and worth of human life and ensure equal protection under the law.
Will Leathers is a sophomore majoring in management information systems. His column runs biweekly.
