I recently watched a video of an exchange that took place in a committee meeting of the Irish Parliament about the legalization of physician-assisted suicide. The exchange was between a young Irish parliamentarian and an expert on medical ethics invited by the committee to testify. The parliamentarian was demanding that the expert explain on what grounds it is wrong for someone to take his or her own life. Since religion, understood as Catholicism, has become taboo in many Irish quarters, she tried to link his opposition to assisted suicide and euthanasia to oppressive categories such as “sin.” As a society now “liberated” from the moral authority of the Church, she wanted to say that such a rationale (one which the expert never employed) was not a legitimate justification to limit people’s freedom in this regard. “How does my decision to end my life impact your life? You, as a white, privileged man, how does my death impact your life?”
Most advocates for the disabled would shudder to hear such statements, because they know that laws that legalize physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia are grave threats to the weakest, the poorest, and the most vulnerable members of society. In an article appearing in Church Life Journal, Jeffrey Bishop, a professor at St. Louis University, examines the effects of enshrining a “right to death” in law. In 2016, the year “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD) law was legalized in Canada, it was listed as the cause of 1,018 deaths. Six years later, it was the cause of 13,241 deaths. “Imagined by its proponents to be a good offered by an enlightened and compassionate culture,” writes Bishop, MAiD has been expanded in Canada as an option not only to the terminally ill, but also those who are disabled.
Bishop refers to the case of a man named Roger Foley, “who having been denied the care he wanted from the NHS of Canada, was offered two options: 1) either pay for the expensive care he needed out of pocket or 2) accept MAiD for no fee.” These laws permitting physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia put death forward as a positive good, a perfectly legitimate therapeutic option. And because it’s expensive to provide medical and social services to people with non-lethal but disabling physical and mental conditions, there will always be some form of pressure put on them to opt for death. In fact, Bishop argues, “once death is accepted as a good (instead of the privation that it is), it reframes all choices, such that [the patient] has to give reasons for not choosing death.”
What the young parliamentarian pretends not to understand is that the law is a moral educator. What a society decides to permit and promote, and what it decides to prohibit, ends up incentivizing and discouraging “certain habits of seeing, understanding, and doing the good.” Bishop continues: “Law and medicine can help to promote the virtuous care of vulnerable persons. But law can also educate morally in the other direction.” Again, “when the powerful combination of medicine and law reframe death – no longer as a privation of the good, but as a good in itself – it distorts how we understand the truth and goodness of life. It changes how we see and take care of vulnerable persons.” When a society legally enshrines suicide and euthanasia as legitimate healthcare options, it is making a statement about what – and whom – it values. By resisting the enactment of such laws we declare that personal autonomy is not an absolute good, especially when it denies the intrinsic goodness of every human life, including the lives of those that require additional care.
posted 11/19/23
The Parish of St. Cecilia-St. Gabriel 