Physician Assisted Suicide

Each individual’s right to their life is complete, total, unequivocal, and absolute. It stands to reason then that the converse, the right to die, also rests with the individual.

The problem once again is statist theocrats and their old books. They believe their old book was written by God, and that God is against euthanasia for humans. They argue that they are fighting for the “sanctity of life,” while they force terminally ill humans to endure months and years of unbearable, unnecessary suffering. These same people wouldn’t think twice about killing an unfortunate thoroughbred suffering a broken ankle to relieve its pain. Horses keep their brains in their bones.

These so-called ‘pro-life” advocates consistently fail to properly define human life. Probably the most infamous display of their wrong-thinking played out in Florida courts, the 24-hour news services, Florida’s state house, and Congress a few years ago. The case of Terri Schiavo, a beautiful young woman, who after suffering cardiac arrest that resulted in massive brain damage in 1990, was kept “alive” in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years. Her husband thought his wife would prefer not to live with a useless, liquid brain: her parents, however, wanted to continue to visit their daughter’s warm body imagining Terri was in there somewhere. Devout Roman Catholics, I’m sure Terri’s parents believed her soul presided in that warm body somewhere, somehow. It is this failure to understand what a human life is that resulted in unnecessary suffering on both sides.

Everything that Terri was died in 1990 when oxygen ceased to reach her brain. Every thought, every memory, everything that Terri was—her conscious and subconscious mind, her soul—lived between her ears before that terrible day. Afterwards, only the most ancient parts of her brain survived to keep her heart beating and her digestive system functioning. Her body was young and strong and could be made to live in this way for decades, without a functioning brain, mindless. Less than a human life.

If one claims to value the sanctity of human life, a proper definition of what it means to be human should be referenced. A human without a brain is not a human. One does not have to be a scholar to be human, but I think at least the hope of sentience, self-awareness, is a reasonable place to draw the line. One can be unconscious, in a coma for months or years, and I would never advocate removing a feeding tube as long as their EEG showed measurable brain activity. But, when the human brain dies, it is the higher functions—our senses, our ability to think and reason—that die first. The brain cannot repair itself: once these abilities are lost, everything that that human being was is lost forever.

When the brain dies first, the question of physician assisted suicide is made by surviving loved ones. Because most of us would prefer death to the sort of existence Terri Schiavo’s body endured, the decision is “easier.” When an individual’s body is first to go, the decision to die is much more difficult.

If my body were to become useless, as happened to Christopher Reeves after his horseback riding accident, or as happened to Dr. Steven Hawking after contracting a degenerative disease, I have always thought certain that I would wish to continue living. If my brain was functioning properly, I could read and think and write. I could still experience life, talk to my wife, watch my children grow up. I value my life and recognize the fact that it is my brain that lives it. Everything that I am lives between my ears.

Only a very narrow set of circumstances would cause me to choose to end my own existence:

If I were terminally ill, certain to die, my body being consumed by a spreading, inoperable cancer; if I were in constant, excruciating pain that caused the doctors to suspend my brain’s proper functions in a fog of Morphine and Demoral all hours of the day and night, I would wish to die. I would choose death, and nobody has any right whatever to force me, or anybody else, to do otherwise.

Presently, in these united states, I have to live in Oregon if I wish to exercise this unalienable right.