Chronic terminal illness is something that our current medical system has little time for. It was a harrowing experience to get a timeline of survival out of the early HIV doctors. When I did, it gave me great purpose and determination to life in a series of Five Year Plans. Not for everyone, but truly a humanitarian boon. I have been extremely proud of my professional and mentoring accomplishments ever since.
The opposition to end-of-life choices must be informed by the knowledge that individual personal and religious beliefs are completely irrelevant and have no bearing on any other individual on the planet. Weber’s arguments about “pleasure or pain being good or evil” are a step in the wrong direction. Duffey’s plea for transformation falls into the Christian acceptance as some offering to their God and a chance to evolve personally. As loathsome as that mentality is to a great many non-religious people, the issue is one of self-determination: The absolute ability of a human being to say that they wish to leave this plane with some clean, purposeful dignity and effort — regardless of the religious scruples of others.
Nine states in the US have assisted suicide laws that are controlled by legal means. Gallup polls show that 71% of Americans are in favor of these laws. Oregon went so far as to make it illegal to prevent someone from trying to get to Oregon for that option. 40 million people across the world have access to assisted suicide. Dr. Daly said that 7 out of 10 Ohioans are for it. A mountain of evidence from seven other countries — Canada, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia, The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg — shows that we would not just go around killing grandma because it is “easier” for us. Not one of these countries, including the US, allows for a weary relative to submit old grandma to euthanasia because they “feel like it.” That idea is a scarecrow argument used by all of those opposed to this notion of self-determination. Sane, secular, stable people want to know that instead of a bloody shotgun to the head, or noose in the garage, that they may have a little help and dignity and understanding in terminating their existence, on their own terms, with the complete and utter knowledge that it is right and proper when facing a terminal illness.
I watched my father succumb to cancer. He suffered, agonized, shrunk and faded until the morphine was finally administered (after days of our begging on our knees) — in tiny state-controlled amounts — until he screamed and begged and finally could not speak anymore. There is no need for anyone to go through that if that individual does not want to — on their own terms. (Dr. Kevorkian, an end-of-life pioneer, was put in jail in Michigan that same year.) If the opposition wants to scream their brains out as they bulge with tumors, believing that their cancer-ridden bodies are somehow an offering to Christ, that is their singular right.
The understanding of a proper and well organized end to one’s self is a completely personal matter and cannot be fraught with others’ personal and religious opinions about what is “wrong,” or that “rights are irrelevant.” Doing so ignores thousands of years of human history that learned to embrace the notion of self-determination, understood the weight of it, and accepted it as a completely normal and proper function of one’s own life-cycle.
Hasn’t anyone watched or read “On The Beach”? “You have to give these pills to our daughter if I do not get back in time…”
Or seen “Soylent Green”? Edward G. Robinson, himself dying of cancer, breathing his last words, “I love you Thorne?”
Or watched “Masada”? “You are a butcher of animals, teach us how to kill ourselves painlessly”
Finally, let us not forget the backbone of modern Western literature, Shakespeare: “Oh happy dagger…”
Matt Johnson is a retired executive, Soviet space historian and author.
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