What Makes Life Valuable?

Google Image

I had an acquaintance who suffered from a particularly virulent form of cancer. He was only in his 50s, but the pain and indignity caused by his illness was too much for him, and, with assistance from a professional in a place it was permitted, he decided to take his own life.

I don’t know enough about his situation to judge, even if that were my job, but I’m sure he decided that life wasn’t worth living and he was unable, or unwilling, to suffer further.

Who knows how many people find themselves in a similar situation? And, as I mentioned, who am I to judge? I hope I don’t find myself in that state, and I hope I would choose a different path of resolution, but who knows?

Labels Don't Mean Much

David Brooks, a writer at Atlantic magazine and a columnist for the New York Times, has an interesting article on the subject in the June edition of the magazine. Brooks was considered a conservative until the Trump era. Now, he doesn’t seem so. I don’t believe those labels mean much anyway, and I don’t think Brooks thinks so either.

Anyway, in an article entitled “The Canadian Way of Death,” Brooks laments the policies of his Canadian homeland on assisted suicide. He described how the Canadian law, passed in 2016 to legalize assisted suicide, originally contained many criteria for people seeking state sanction of their suicides. But then came the infamous “slippery slope.”

“Within a few years,” Brooks writes, “Canada went from being a country that had banned assisted suicide to being one of the loosest regimes in the world.”

Brooks attributes that to the dominance of individual autonomy as society’s highest value.

David Brooks

“When people who were suffering applied to the program and said, ‘I choose to die,’ Canadian society apparently had no shared set of morals that would justify saying no. If individual autonomy is the highest value, then when somebody comes to you and declares, ‘It’s my body. I can do what I want with it,’ whether they are near death of not, painfully ill or not, doesn’t really matter. Autonomy rules.”

Brooks cites several examples of people who availed themselves of assisted suicide under the law. One was Rosina Kamis, who had fibromyalgia and chronic leukemia, as well as other mental and physical illnesses. At age 41, she was granted permission to end her life and was put to death by a lethal injection in 2021.

Before her death, she is quoted as saying, “Please keep all this secret while I am still alive because … the suffering I experience is mental suffering, not physical. I think if more people cared about me, I might be able to handle the suffering caused by my physical illnesses alone.”

Brooks argues his case against assisted suicide by citing what he sees as best for society as well as the individual. But he mentions in passing that “life is sacred,” and that’s the view I believe should be held by people searching for God.

Promoters of assisted suicide describe it as “death with dignity,” a presumption that anyone who is sick, suffering from mental or physical disabilities, lacks dignity by definition. But the dictionary defines dignity as “nobility or elevation of character; worthiness.”

Are They Unworthy?

And that, seems to me, is the crutch of the matter. Are people in such situations unworthy? How about people with disorders like Alzheimer’s disease or with severe Downs Syndrome? Aren’t these people “unworthy?” Don’t they deserve respect?

It’s natural that people fear death, but perhaps more than death, they fear the pain and suffering, loss of control of bodily functions or dementia that often precede it. And many worry about being left alone or being a burden on others.

But a caring society, seems to me, would do much more to help people with these issues instead of helping them die. A caring society realizes that suicide is a terrible tragedy, one that it should work to prevent.

The attitude of my Catholic faith, and of many other religions, is that all humans are endowed with dignity simply by being children of God. So, the attitude of people searching for God toward assisted suicide, in my view, should be similar to their attitude toward abortion: “Is this the best we can do?”