Assisted suicide timeline hopelessly flawed
This time, the proponents of assisted suicide think they’ve got it right. Trapped in the nebulous area of trying to establish criteria for when assisted suicide should be allowed, without danger of being accused of sliding down that proverbial slippery slope, British advocates have come up with a proposal.
They seem to think that this time, it’s foolproof. It isn’t.
The U.K.’S Commission on Assisted Dying released a report of 400 pages this past week, authored by lawyers, doctors and an ex-police commissioner, which would allow for assisted suicide in people 18 or older, who are mentally competent and have a maximum of 12 months to live. “There should be a change for a tightly defined group of people who are terminally ill, of sound mind and not being pressured into a decision,” is the way commission member Barbara Young described it.
Assisted suicide would not be permitted for those of unsound mind, with dementia or locked-in syndrome. Two doctors would have to vet the patient’s request and there’d be a two-week waiting period, ostensibly to permit the patient time to reconsider and possibly change his or her mind.
This is all obviously intended to circumvent the inevitable accusations that depressed people, or those who are only chronically ill, but not terminal, would be allowed to request to die, and the hope is likely that other such pitfalls of previous assisted-suicide proposals could be avoided. No such luck.
The flaw in the commission’s reasoning is obvious. Doctors are not infallible. At the end of 12 months, the patient might go on living. Getting a second opinion doesn’t prove anything, either. Nobody has any way of knowing how long an individual is going to live. Sure, doctors know approximately how long it takes certain terminal diseases to run their ugly course, but they do not have crystal balls. Case in point: a friend of mine was given three months to live after a diagnosis of cancer. He lived another five years. And had this friend been living in a society where a 12-month rule applied, doctors might have approved his request and cruelly deprived him of the extra five years of high quality time he enjoyed with his wife and family.
This kind of scenario can too easily happen when doctors are granted the authority to play God. Not only are doctors not infallible; the people who enact such laws are not infallible, either.
Some time ago, I read an article by a journalist who has ALS. He very cogently and touchingly outlined the reasons why he should be allowed to choose when and how he dies, instead of waiting for this cruel disease he suffers from to make the decision for him. He was obviously of very sound mind, and his arguments and rationale were intelligently put forth. He said basically that it was his body and his life, and if he felt he had reached the point where he wanted to let go of it, it was his business — not that of the busybodies who would prevent him from exercising his right to make a decision that was really none of their business.
He has a point, and in reading his story, one can’t help but agree that he should indeed be in charge of his own death. The trouble is, when you try to extrapolate that to some sort of law that would encompass all kinds of people in a bewildering variety of circumstances, it doesn’t work. That’s how commissions come up with such unworkable proposals as a death timeline of 12 months. They’re going to have to go back to the drawing board on that one; in fact, it should have been a nonstarter.
Where there’s life, there’s hope — and sometimes, that hope can turn to reality. There’s no way of knowing which patient will experience that, so no commission can claim to presume someone is doomed because a doctor says so.