I am no stranger to lost causes. And, while there is always hope, it does appear that David Seymour’s “End of Life Choice” law will receive the necessary endorsement of voters to finally legalise assisted suicide in this country. A significant minority of voters will dissent, however.
I will be one of them.
You may be interested in the reasons why this is. I have no expectation of changing your mind here. It might be, however, that you find some value in understanding how somebody could go against the grain on an issue like this.
Before we begin, however, I confess to being a Roman Catholic. The church holds that homicide is wrong, however inflicted and including by suicide. As a spiritual matter, that is my position too.
As a matter of public policy, however, my religious objection to suicide is beside the point.
We live in a pluralistic society and religious injunctions that are not also sensible to secular reasoning have no claim on the content of the civil law.
I would not, for example, support a law making church attendance compulsory. I would support continuing to recognise theft as a crime, however, not because it breaks one of the Ten Commandments but because a society that tolerates stealing will not last very long. My objection to the principle of legalising the assistance of suicide of the unwell is of a similar nature.
A better example might be the death penalty. The practice of executing criminals violates my sense of the inviolability of life and being a Catholic no doubt has influenced that. Whatever its origin in my case, however, there is nothing exclusively religious about valuing human life as an innately worthy thing and there are plenty of unchurched people who oppose the death penalty on the same grounds.
I would also make clear that, while I fear it may result, I do not believe that advocates of assisted suicide see the issue as an opportunity to control health costs and preserve inheritances. I believe want to help the suffering to kill themselves to bring about an early end to pain and discomfort. That is a perfectly intelligible view that on first examination appears to be quite humane if the means of suicide are available only to those who freely choose it.
The problem is that this very libertarian view of the freedom to choose is quite often, in practice, a myth.
For there to be a real choice, there has to be meaningful alternatives. If we create a regime offering an accelerated and inexpensive death that involves no real burden on the state or people’s families then, unless we are absolutely certain that people will not feel badly about sticking with a longer and much more expensive death that will require family support and may erode inheritances, then we are not really creating that meaningful choice. What we are doing is creating an environment that validates the feelings of people worried they are a burden on their family, friends and caregivers.
A friend of mine was recently admitted to hospital after suffering a heart attack. While he was in one of the wards, he overheard a discussion between a nurse or doctor and an elderly patient who was being moved to a different hospital for heart surgery. The subject of non-resuscitation came up, and the staff member stressed at great length how distressing it would be to wake up with people jumping all over you as they tried to keep you alive.
This is not the first time I have heard about that kind of subtle pressure being applied in this way. And that’s what it is. And maybe in theory you can do away with it, but the trouble is that once you grant that some lives aren’t worth living, no matter how short, you are giving in to an ominous logic.
There is no way that a young person would be subject to persistent questioning over the wisdom of being resuscitated. It just wouldn’t happen. And it is dangerous to reinforce the temptation to see things that way by giving an official imprimatur to suicide as a solution to suffering.
There are all sorts of practical reasons to oppose this law. However, strictly drafted, for example, there will always be some cases that go through which, by design, should not. No system conceived of and operated by humans is perfect and if the fear of executing the innocent is a good reason to reject the death penalty, the same logic holds here.
Why should we rely on the paper safeguards written into the law when similar safeguards were quickly outstripped by practice in the case of abortion when it was partially legalised in the 1970s?
Ultimately, however, I would reject assisted suicide even if I did believe that the law, as written, could be flawlessly executed at all times.
People supporting this law are, I am sure, doing so out of what they consider to be compassion for those fearful of a painful and protracted death. But the risks involved are real (as doctors and nurses specialising in end of life care have attested). Before we countenance this we should, at the very least, be ensuring that access to palliative care is readily available to all New Zealanders without cost.
That’s not going to happen. I will dutifully line up tomorrow and vote against the measure. I will do this knowing that it will be a vain effort and with grave concern for New Zealand not as a Roman Catholic, but as somebody with real worries about the implications of what we are doing for my vulnerable compatriots.