We, like all animals, have an instinctive urge to stay alive, and that’s easily explained. Evolutionary forces dictate that any species that lacks it would quickly cease to exist. But another urge — the urge to reproduce — matters as much. Since death is inevitable, reproduction enables a species to perpetuate itself. In a good many species, adult death follows immediately upon reproduction and offspring are equipped with the survival skills — or perhaps just the sheer numbers — needed to survive. For those species, parental longevity isn’t necessary.
For more advanced species, the newly born possess the urge to live, but don’t have the means to do so. For them, species survival requires that parents sustain their own lives at least until their young can survive on their own. I bring all this up only to point out that while staying alive until reproduction, and perhaps for a period of nurturing young, is of supreme evolutionary value, staying alive beyond that diminishes it. An older creature’s experience may be of value to others, but no species has unlimited life-sustaining environmental resources, and long-lived adults will use those resources while contributing less and less to group survival as they age.
In our own species, however, longevity seems to have become a goal in itself. If there’s a current public consensus on a goal for human beings, longevity is it. Seeking long life has become a preoccupation. There’s an ongoing national discussion about the ways in which longevity can be achieved. Exercise, the consumption of the right foods, the avoidance of environmental dangers and contaminated foods, and medical ways to lengthen life are written about daily. The media tells us about rich people
who are seeking to live to be two hundred years old — devoting their lives to living, as it were.
Given this preoccupation, people are inclined to speak of an inherent “right to life,” but a right is not something inherent; it’s something granted by an existing power, like those First Amendment rights granted by our government. The grantor assumes an obligation to enforce the right, and, insofar as it does so, the right exists. Some people believe in a supernatural being who grants rights, but there’s no evidence that such a being exists, or acts to protect any rights it has granted.
Nor is there an innate right to death, however inevitable it is. But, in this country, there are now fourteen states that have granted that right, insofar as doctor-assisted suicide has been made legal. It’s not a strings-free right in any of those states. It’s quite restrictive, with age requirements, requirements for a full understanding of what is being requested by the person seeking death, and a predicted death from natural causes within six months of the time of the request. In other words, it’s not actually the right to die; it’s the right to die somewhat sooner than you would otherwise, and with less pain.
Self-inflicted death – suicide – used to be a crime. It isn’t anymore, but an unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide can, even today, have serious, freedom-limiting consequences. The assumption seems to be that no one in their right mind wants to die, so those who try to kill themselves and fail are “dangers to themselves” and are compelled to undergo treatment. For some Christians, suicide continues to be a mortal sin because of either God’s commandment against murder, or his supposed right to decide when every human’s life should end.
But the evidence suggests that a great many perfectly sane Americans wish to commit suicide. Over the past few decades, in those few states that have permitted assisted suicide, some 45,000 people have had their wish to do so.
I agree that young humans are susceptible to extreme emotions and may commit suicide when experiencing the temporary conviction that their lives are no longer worth living. That must be prevented. But, in this column, I’m concerned with adult suicide and the prevailing, but mistaken, assumption that old people’s wish to die is irrational and must be treated as a psychological malfunction, when, in fact, it is completely rational and justified.
Medical science is dedicated to prolonging life and has been successful in doing so. The expected life-span is now 70-plus years due largely to medical science’s prevention of childhood deaths, development of vaccines for adult diseases, and techniques to partially compensate for aging people’s loss of abilities. But medical science will never be capable of preventing the deterioration of bones, cells, flesh, nerves, senses and organs that come about with age. There will always be those humans who, as they age, lose their ability to do what they most wish to do, and are acutely aware of, and unhappy with, that fact. They may grow tired of their pain, their weaknesses, and their inability to be anything but a burden to others. They may come to the conclusion that their continued existence is not only pointless, but selfish. Their innate urge to live will have diminished.
What, then, aside from religious prejudice, prevents adult assisted suicide from being everywhere legal? Is it the medical profession’s commitment to “do no harm”? Ask yourself what that commitment actually means. Doesn’t it mean that a physician
must seek to diminish a patient’s suffering? Isn’t assisting in someone’s suicide consistent with that pledge? If a patient has thought carefully about his or her condition and feels that life has become mainly suffering, what forbids a doctor from assisting in bringing about a “cure” for that condition? “Do no harm” is no longer an accurate summation of a doctor’s duty; it’s simplistic and incomplete. In any case, many of the oaths that medical professionals take today omit it, and that’s as it should be.
I must add that the current right-to-die laws’ refusal to enable an assisted death less than six months before a predicted natural death is unjustifiable. It’s like a doctor saying “I’ll only relieve your suffering once I’m sure that it may continue for at least six months without my intervention.”
In sum, I’d argue that the right to die is as basic as any First Amendment right, and we need our federal government to recognize that.
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