Let’s all live forever!

October 5, 2005

Disappearing Soon, in a store near you:

Assisted Suicide

Growing up in Michigan, I was familiarized with the plight of a certain Jack Kevorkian, who was made famous in the mid 90s for a series of assisted suicide trials, none of which, I believe, he was ever convicted. They did put him away for some other auxillary offence, like drug trafficking, or distributing…

But nevertheless, having recently been made aware of it (I’m only now old enough to really understand any of the underlying concepts, rights and freedoms that are being violated) I am particularly fond of this defense:

[The Physician] asserts that he is NOT trying to assist the patient in ending his/her life, but rather, he is medicating the person properly so as to alleviate the pain and suffering that accompanies many terminal illnesses. In certain cases, it is an a fact, that the dose of pain medication required to alleviate the pain of the sufferer is more than lethal.

So the problem is, as doctor’s you’ve pledged an oath to save lives. You’ve pledged an oath to alleviate pain & suffering. Unfortunately, the two events are not mutually exclusive. Now, I’m certainly not talking about euthanasia, which is reprehensible. I’m talking about mutually agreed upon, self-determination.

To all of those, who would question my desire to “play God,” by ending some vegetable’s life, I would pose the following counter-query:

“Why do you have the opposite God-complex— that is, why do you desire to prolong the life of someone who is incapable of self-sustenance? Why do you desire to “play God” and force people to live far longer than “god” had naturally intende?”

You cannot respond with “it’s god’s will that John Q. be hooked up to a ventilator and feeding tube.” This presupposes that it’s God’s will that everyone live to perpetuity. Even assuming the existence of an omnipotent God, this is clearly not the case, I don’t think this needs any explaining.

The ventilator and feeding tube are as much a construct of man, as is a lethal dose of pain medication. If it’s wrong to assist someone to die, it’s wrong to force them to live. If we can’t nullify the effects of the wrathful illnesses with which “God” has afflicted us and end our own lives, then we ought not be able to prolong those same lives in defiance of the same wrathful illnesses. The arguments cancel one another out, and what we’re left with is a person who is going to die painfully.

Pardon the religioso tangent, but I had to get that while it was still fresh. Later, I’ll hit on the actual issue as it pertains to rights, and I’ll try to whip up a constitutional stew.

Doinkicarus


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