DIALOGUE: Death, Dignity and Doctors

A Simple, Basic Right
By Geov Parrish

MY PERSPECTIVE on this issue comes not only from my activism and pacifism, but also from the fact that I’ve survived multiple suicide attempts (the first when I was nine) and a terminal illness first diagnosed six years ago, for which I received an experimental multiple organ transplant two years ago.

As such, I’m probably above average in my appreciation of pain, depression and the pitfalls of medicine. And with those imperfections, I still believe absolutely that the only person qualified to make a decision about whether, with all available information, a life is or is not worth continuing, is the individual living that life. Nobody else: not a doctor, not a friend or family member, and especially not a government.

I spent several years in degenerating physical condition. Though I was surrounded by caring, loving people, I knew each day that I was ultimately alone: Nobody else, no matter how well intentioned, understood or could understand my situation, what life was like waking each day in a body at war with itself. For someone whose situation is so acute that they cannot carry out suicide themselves, but require assistance, that isolation is likely to be even more powerful,and the concerns of the best-intentioned moralists and lobbyists even less relevant. They don’t have to live in your body; you do.

Would assisted suicide save money for HMOs and other greedy health care providers? Probably. Should we keep agonized individuals alive to spite those HMOs? No. Can friends, family members, or doctors exert powerful, selfish influences over an individual’s decision? Of course. Yet this happens in every medical decision. We don’t deny a woman the right to abortion because she might be pressured into a bad decision; we defend her control over her body, and trust her judgment on what is invariably a wrenching decision.

Will some people make decisions that seem, in retrospect, tragic and impulsive? Probably. But how can you tell? It’s hard to be impulsive when you al and emotional, and tolerance for it over time, vary widely among people; so, in this country’s wretched excuse for a health care system, does access to treatment. So does the will to struggle against overwhelming barriers. Ultimately, only one person is best qualified to decide.

To suggest that a terminally ill person is any less capable of independent judgment, when that person is far more likely to be in a situation none of the people around her or him have experienced, is insulting. Given that the people affected by assisted suicide laws are only those physically unable to act on their desire to die, it is also ablist and discriminatory. It is also cruel, selfish, and colonial. It is demanding that somebody stay alive, usually in misery, so as to conform to ethical standards of people whose lives don’t remotely resemble theirs.

I am a pacifist because I believe in the sanctity of life. I also believe that life is an organic process, and death is a natural part of it. To be able to die, with dignity, in a manner of one’s choosing, is both a sacred act and a simple and basic right. We have no business taking that right away.

DIALOGUE: Death, Dignity and Doctors, Part 2: What is a Good Enough Life?

[War Resisters League Website] [Nonviolent Activist Index]
March-April 1997: [Gulf Coverup Radicalizes Vets] [A Simple, Basic Right] [What is a Good Enough Life?] [Postcards from Belgrade] [Activist News] [War Facts]

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