STICKING TO ONE’S GUNS
The Archbishop of Toronto, Cardinal Thomas Collins, produced and long and insufferable video diatribe on physician-assisted suicide. His effort was a lesson in verbosity and nonsense-making. I watched it in its entirety. When he finally tired I sought out a second opinion.
The most cited and searched piece on the same topic seemed to be the words of Andrew Coyne in the National Post. Essentially agreeing with Collins, Coyne wrote that new laws allowing physician-assisted suicide “would permit a physician, normally obliged by the code of his profession to save life, to take a life instead.” He finished the piece arguing:
Once you have normalized suicide, from a tragedy we should seek to prevent to a release from suffering we should seek to assist, it is logically incoherent – indeed, it is morally intolerable – to restrict its benefits to some, while condemning others to suffer interminably, merely on the grounds that they are incapable of giving consent. So it is that assisted suicide has gone, in the space of a year, from a crime, to something to be tolerated in exceptional circumstances, to a public service. Perhaps you see this as progress. But I cannot help feeling that a society that can contemplate putting children to death has somehow lost its way.
Now this is either the worst piece of propaganda ever attempted or the kind of narrowness of mind and shallowness of morals, so unimaginative and inexperienced, it can only have been brewed out of a school of economics or in the humanity-annihilating echo-chamber of a religious institution. How else could one formulate such an argument? How, unless they’d never personally suffered at all (or given such suffering much thought) nor experienced, in an intimate way, the suffering of another (child, woman, man, or beast)? How, unless there was a cold and critical sanction in your gilded rule book? Just how confused (how isolated from experiences and feelings) must one be to willfully misread pure compassion as an especially sick and corrupting form of murder; and, further, encourage others to perform this same gratuitous illogic? It’s beyond bizarre.
The proposal to allow doctor-assisted suicide in no way (not at all, in any sense) permits a doctor to take a life. The attending physician is not taking someone’s life: the person seeking their help has chosen to take their own life, but wishes to do so with dignity under the care, safety, and supervision of a professional – and with their attendant loved ones not facing criminal charges or jail time. And we’re not talking about someone ending their life on a whim: someone who lost their job, broke up with their girlfriend, or is just having a bad day. The only people eligible for assisted suicide would be those suffering a “grievous and irremediable illness.” Further, even with this reasonably high barrier, the one seeking assistance still has to jump though a series of hoops, which are considerable for someone so severely unwell. These hurdles include finding two impartial, independent witnesses who will sign a written statement of intent and another two independent physicians who can attest to both the patient’s interminable suffering and their rightheadedness.
Contrary to what both Coyne and Collins would have you believe (based on their practiced and passionate misreading of texts and their unreasoned argumentum ad verecundiam), the Hippocratic Oath makes no prohibition against assisted suicide. Instead it implores physicians to “either help or do not harm the patient.” So, I ask Collins and Coyne, and all Canadians, is ensuring the continued pain and suffering of your patient, and doing so entirely against their sober, informed and unhurried will, and that of their loved ones, not clearly and uncontroversially on the side of “harm” and very obviously far from “help”? What would any ethicist (or eight-year-old) say?
What’s most troubling about opposition to this legislation is the obvious hypocrisy. Millions of Canadians are, out of pure love and compassion, already allowed to end the life of a loved one. The act is even carried out with the assistance of a trained medical professional. And, perhaps bizarrely, they’re even able to do so without knowing, with any real certainty, the wishes of their loved one, or even having the unequivocal consent of the one they kill. We do this daily, and do so in unanimous agreement that this is often the only rational, humane course of action. We do this on behalf of someone on life-support, in a vegetative state, and we even do this for Rover and Mr Mittens. We do it from a place of pure compassion and love, not waywardness and cruelty. And yet we would deny this choice even to ourselves, in our most sober and rational moment, knowing fully our own wishes, and even after consultation with our friends and family and the oversight of no less than four impartial strangers? And, further still, we would deny this option to ourselves even under circumstances in which the only available alternatives are unrelenting suffering, a drug-induced stupor, or both? Bizarre!
Coyne and the leaders of the Catholic Church feel very strongly about this. They feel that real compassion is to force someone, entirely against their will, to be held indefinitely in a torturous pseudo-living purgatory. They think it’s rational and humane to prevent someone from having any peace or even autonomy of any kind, and to instead keep them alive above all else. They feel its moral to hold you against your will in this way, even if it means you’re being fed through a tube, and are nevermore able to enjoy food or drink; even if you lose all bodily control and cannot help but to urinate, defecate, and drool on yourself; even if it means you cannot read, write, watch the sunrise, or even roll over in bed and must be imperfectly drugged out of your wits in order to control your constant, varied, and overwhelming pains. And they would leave you there like that for decades if that’s as long as it takes for you to die “naturally.” What is more, what is really sick, is that Coyne and the Catholic Church see themselves fit to make this call for you and for everyone else. This is what it means to be opposed to this change in the law.
Change to the law would not require anyone to seek assisted suicide. Catholics would still free to suffer indefinitely in this life to avoid a hellish afterlife, as Yahweh would have it. Or, ignoring the threat of hell, they’re would still be welcome to jump from a bridge or in front of a train, slit their wrists, overdose on a mixture of prescription drugs and vodka, asphyxiate themselves with grocery bag and duct tape, or place a shotgun barrel between their lips and squeeze the trigger – leaving a nice scene for their children or grandchildren to stumble upon.
(NOTE: I consider the Catholic prohibition against suicide as an act of terrorism [terrorism: the use of violence or threats of violence for political ends.])
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