Euthanasia’s Slippery Slope

Here’s Wesley J. Smith on the latest developments in the “right to die” movement:

The international euthanasia movement’s first principle is radical individualism. The idea is that we each own our own body and hence should be able to do what we choose with our physical self — including destroy it. Not only that, but if we want to die, liberty dictates that we should have ready access to a “good death,” a demise that is peaceful and pain-free. […]

Phillip Nitschke is another prominent euthanasia advocate who reveals the euthanasia movement’s radical individualist mindset. Nitschke is known as the Jack Kevorkian of Australia, and for good reason: He believes in death-on-demand. And like Kevorkian, he has not limited his “death counseling” to the terminally ill. This included, most notoriously, a woman named Nancy Crick who made headlines when she announced on Australian television and internationally through her website that she would commit assisted suicide because she had terminal cancer. But when her autopsy showed she was cancer free, Nitschke admitted he and Crick had known all along that she wasn’t dying but pronounced that medical fact “irrelevant” because she wanted to die.

Nitschke’s radical individualist mindset was demonstrated most vividly in a June 5, 2001, interview with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, in which he asserted that suicide facilitation should be available to “anyone who wants it, including the depressed, the elderly bereaved [and] the troubled teen.” Toward achieving this end, funded abundantly by the Hemlock Society of the United States (now merged with Compassion in Dying into the newly named Compassion and Choice), Nitschke experimented with developing a “peaceful pill” that could be used to commit a pain-free suicide. According to Nitschke, the peaceful pill was to be for anyone who wanted it, even asserting in NRO that it “should be available in the supermarket so that those old enough to understand death could obtain death peacefully at the time of their choosing.”[…]

United States advocates like to pretend that legalized facilitated death will always be limited to the actively dying when nothing else can be done to alleviate suffering. But this is highly unlikely. Once one accepts the noxious notion that killing is an acceptable answer to the problem of human suffering, how can it possibly be limited to the terminally ill?

After all, disabled people, the elderly, and those with devastating existential grief caused by, say, the sudden death of family members, may suffer more profoundly — and for a longer period of time — than the terminally ill. If “self-deliverance” is, in principle, okay for those who experience less suffering for a shorter duration, then how would we justify denying termination to those who would seem to have a greater claim to receiving help to die?

I think Smith is right to point to a kind of radical individualism as one of the philosophical underpinnings of this movement. I would add to that the idea that human life is only worth living if it is devoid of suffering. An idea more diametrically opposed to the Judeo-Christian tradition is hard to imagine. Even paganism found nobility in suffering. If we make the lack of suffering the sine qua non of life we will truly have become Nietzschean last men.