EDITORIAL Suicide debate shows need to learn meaning of life and dignity
after death
The current debate over
physician-assisted suicide, disturbing enough on purely medical terms, is, on a
deeper and more telling level, a debate about what we have become as a people
and a culture.
It is emblematic of a cultural extreme in which individualism and
individual autonomy is the good, outweighing any connection to community --
even family -- or any obligation to the larger society.
It represents the beauty of individual rights grown out of
control, beyond all proportion to other equally compelling human rights and
human instincts.
Within the language of the proponents of assisted suicide are the
kernels of the new culture. Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the leading proponent and
practitioner of physician-assisted suicide, demeans the notion of fixed values
and declares his belief that one should have the right to "do and say whatever
you want to do and say at any time you want to do or say it as long as you do
not harm or threaten anybody else's person or property." One can only presume
here a notion of "harm" as truncated and myopic as his notion of personal
freedom.
Derek Humphry, a euthanasia activist, explains, "The modern world
has got to take account of the fact that religion no longer has the hold it
once did." His point also requires accepting that the once revered notion of
the "common good" and the ethical and moral presumptions upon which it rested
have begun to unravel.
Flawed as the lived practice of "common good" may be, there is
something deeply unsettling about abandoning the idea altogether.
Curiously, the groundwork for relinquishing such ideals is laid in
areas seemingly distant from the battlegrounds of giant life-and-death
questions. The seeds are sown amid the culture of greed, of bare-fisted
capitalism, where respectability is bestowed on those who would objectify human
beings for the sake of profit. And that culture has had a profound effect on
the healing arts and how we view the whole continuum of life.
If our moral antennae can be numbed enough that we not only accept
but also reward those who regularly discard human beings for the sake of the
bottom line, then the ethic of the quick fix, of convenience, of what best
suits ourselves, right now, runs rampant. And the ties of work, of family, of
community eventually become as worthless as the homeless, the downsized and the
terminally ill.
The ethic permeates the institutions that are supposed to heal.
Doling out treatment has become a society-wide triage, weeding out haves from
have-nots. Our medical industry is great at performing the spectacular fix, but
many physicians know next to nothing about treating the end of life. Death is
seen as something apart from human experience, a failure on the part of
medicine.
It is only slowly, very slowly, through such programs as hospice,
that we are beginning to educate ourselves about the dignity and place of dying
in human experience.
As one hospice expert said in an interview, we don't need to give
doctors any more control, we need to spend more time and money on enhancing
end-of-life care. Palliative care is not cost free, nor is it, by definition, a
cure. The church sees nothing wrong with increasing pain medication for someone
terminally ill, even if the medication will hasten death, as long as the
primary intent is relief of pain, not death.
The pro-euthanasia argument in the wider culture is about
something else altogether, based as it is on an extreme, utilitarian view of
the human person. The argument takes on a dangerous edge with the realization
that death is the most efficient and cost-effective solution to a host of human
ills.
The public debate and the clamor for lifting laws prohibiting
assisted suicide will continue, even if the Supreme Court turns down the
current request.
Eventually the debate will force the question for each of us: What
is the Christian, specifically the Catholic Christian, to do?
One will not find an answer in much of the public religion that so
loudly decries the results of greed -- such social ills as broken families,
rampant addictions and lawlessness -- while ignoring the unbridled
individualism that breeds the problem. Public religion preaches punishment as
solution, a cure as wedded as is euthanasia to the quick-fix, convenience
ethic.
Nor will reason be served by oversimplifying the real medical
dilemmas and complexities that regularly are entwined with the drama and
suffering at life's end. Medicine is as much at conflict with itself over the
end of life -- over what should be protected and how -- as it is over the same
issues at life's beginning.
So we are left with what? Our wits? The Word? A long tradition of
reverence for life? Not a bad start. And all of those elements have come into
play in the strong statements that Catholic bishops, physicians, ethicists and
others have already made and will continue to make.
But a caution is inherent here. If the bishops are to continue to
speak to the culture with authority, they must resist aligning themselves with
narrow interests for the sake of political gain. If the long abortion debate
has taught them anything, it should be clear that the bishops, with the best of
intentions, can end up being shamelessly used by conservative political
operatives who have little in common with the bishops on most elements of the
Catholic social agenda.
This time, the bishops should play to their greatest strength --
the deeply human story of the community they shepherd. It is clear that the
heart of the culture is unchanged by law or punishment. But our Catholic story,
rich in its instinct for life, and the example of our community, are
life-changing elements. What better example than Cardinal Joseph Bernardin who,
in dying, held a nation rapt with his declaration that he greeted death as a
friend?
There are others, less known, on the same journey. And there are
the legions of Catholic caregivers who daily live with death and develop deep
insights into the mysteries of that passage.
This is what the culture needs to hear, not bludgeoning lectures
and threats, not political maneuvering and compromise.
Just our story, the gospel lived, again and again, deeply
convinced, compassionate and human.
National Catholic Reporter, January 17,
1997
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